On Those That Hated
by CBK1000
Summary: 12th entry in an ongoing AU Originals series. Klaroline
1. Part One

**A/N: So this part takes place entirely in Ireland which means...no Klaroline. :( They will, of course, be back in the next section (and Caroline in particular will be heavily featured). Nobody has fun being a vampire on TO or TVD, and so that's what I wanted to explore, to have this lighthearted (if murderous) carousing and show that eternity doesn't have to be all doom and gloom and single man tears.**

 **Also, yes, the book Tim references during the scene between him and Kol in Christchurch Cathedral is a real one. It's called 'Brotherly Love' by Mary Anne Graham.**

 **The title of this fic has been snagged from Yeats' poem: 'On Those That Hated "The Playboy of the Western World".**

* * *

 **2014, Dublin**

The moon has deigned to show herself tonight, and lies softly on the trees.

The front gate is majestic with that glimmer of imperial silver.

He wraps his fingers round the bars, and cocks his head.

There is a certain hush imparted by mental illness, children come to test their mettle at its gates, men ward their chests with that useless crossing of the breast, woman perhaps feels within her own that instinctive shudder of maternal compassion.

But you can be sure she keeps walking.

You see, the human mind is so fragile.

What does it understand of true psychosis- of course there was that Hannibal chap a few years back who fed his guests only the best and fattest of their friends, of course their televisions blabber at them of this faraway thing, war, but man in all his relative normality will never grasp how his brain can simply crack, and in its gaps develop a fondness for corpses, a taste for murder, a proclivity for children.

You see, darlings, you seal it away not to diagnose it, but to disdain it.

You wish it to wither beneath your collective contempt, and fade as the fashions will, quietly into the next season where better hemlines prevail, and more daring necklines debut.

But he rather likes it.

The psychoses, he means; last season's hemlines were an eye pestilence.

He rips the gate out of the ground with a loud screech, and lets it fall.

He steps over it.

Tim tosses him his bat.

He cracks his neck, and looks up at this fortress of the damned with a smile.

Remember, darlings.

He does ask that you hold all applause until the end.

* * *

Here's a tip: you always spread out.

So he is centered squarely between Tim and Enzo (you always frame the handsomest), with just enough space between shoulders to allow for that casual swinging of arm or bat, and the strut that, if executed correctly, takes up just a bit more space than necessary in this world you are about to own.

Tim is smoking.

Enzo checks his hair in one of the windows they pass.

He hefts the bat over his shoulder and begins to whistle some pop tune or another he heard this afternoon on one of the local stations.

Never be afraid to throw in a skip or two, darlings.

You want to have fun and be yourself, after all.

The woman at the front desk looks up with a frown.

He steps forward and gives her his best smile, and she blinks for a moment- yes, darling, he knows, you have to recover a bit from him- and then the eyes skim over his shoulder and flick up to find Tim with his cigarette between his fingers.

"I'm sorry, sir, smoking's not allowed."

He takes the cigarette from Tim and has a good drag on it, then flicks it into the bin beside her desk.

The bat is handed off once more to Tim, and her shoulders gently taken in his hands when she starts up with a yell, and now he leans in and focuses on her eyes until they glass over with his will.

"Just a quick question and a request, darling. Where are your drugs, and I'm going to need a list of your worst offenders. Have you got a good murderer or two for me? A really deranged one. I'm not going to be satisfied with some little crime of passion. Surely someone's calmly cooked and eaten their husband recently, or you've some burgeoning serial killer who dissected their youngest sibling and put them back in the cot so their mother wouldn't know it was them."

"What do you think we're breeding here in Ireland?" Tim asks incredulously.

"Well, over a century ago some of their best stock escaped, and look at you now. I have high hopes."

"We mostly house mentally-ill prisoners."

"Excellent. You must have a few standouts in their midst."

"We do," she says robotically. "The drugs are in some cupboards in the nurse's station. I can give you whatever you need."

"We'll take one of everything. Just direct my friend here to your best." He lets go of her shoulders, and holds out his hand for his bat, nodding at Tim.

The bin is beginning to crackle in earnest now, the flames tonguing over the lip of it to take swipes at the polished wooden desk.

Tim swings his rucksack from his shoulder and begins to indiscriminately sweep little bottles and syringes from the cupboard she unlocks; Enzo leans his shoulder against the wall beside him, looking amused. He nods at one of the bottles. "Mate, if you can take two of those and come out the other side still ready for whatever murder party this is all inevitably going to turn into, I'll eat your hat."

"You will not eat my hat," Tim replies, sounding affronted.

He lets himself into the rooms the woman helpfully unlocks for him, and to each of his new recruits says to just do what comes naturally to them, don't worry, darlings, about what offense the Garda might take, think of the headlines, why settle for the merely infamous when you can have the famous, that Hannibal chap got his own show, after all-

The desk is on fire when he ambles back down the hallway with the woman at his side.

Tim and Enzo have snacked on two caretakers he sees when he rounds the desk, and Tim takes out his gun now and blows half of either's neck away, to hide the fang marks.

He turns to the woman.

He's not Nik, so he doesn't bother caressing her cheek, or offering those slithery reassurances of the serpent to poor gullible Eve.

He smashes in her face with the bat, and leaves her still gurgling on the floor.

The patients precede them into the night.

He throws his arm fondly round Tim as he watches them go, and kisses the corner of his mouth.

"Well, what did you get?" Tim asks him, looping an arm round his own neck, and wiping what must be some of the woman's blood from his chin. He sticks his thumb in his mouth, and sucks it off.

"One shot his mother to death after she refused to bang him; another ate his friend's penis, and you'll have to wait for the news to find out what the third and fourth did."

"Ah, Jaysus. Good-bye, me fair Dublin," Tim sighs wistfully.

* * *

He's a bit out of practice, but he divvies up the lines quite neatly with the bank card he's taken from the wallet of the man who should have known better anyway, drug dealing, darling, it always comes back to bite you in the ass.

Or rip out your throat.

Tim's eyes water when he takes his first sniff, but he coughs, tips back his head, wipes what residual white is left under his nose, and knocks back a good several lines.

They are chased by a large swig of Jameson and a handful of pills from one of the bottles scattered across the floor.

"What are those?" he asks, snagging a few from Tim before he can put them back.

"Dunno."

They knock the bottle necks of their respective alcohols, and switch for a moment, he tipping back a long drink of Tim's Jameson, Tim his Boru.

Enzo dumps another gram of cocaine onto the table. "Gentlemen; don't make a friend feel like a third wheel," he says, and holds out his hand for the bank card.

He gives Enzo the smile that has been known to spontaneously combust more than a few undergarments. "You're welcome to join in at any time."

Tim hunches his shoulders, and swigs half the Jameson.

* * *

They crash three cars into several downtown buildings, steal one of the coaches from Bus Eireann's main station, drive it into that quaint little pond just inside Stephen's Green, set the worst of the street performers on fire with one of his own torches.

He believes (it's all a bit of a haze) at least three statues are the worse for wear, Croke Park was privy to some of the best sex he's ever had (Tim is quite aggressive with a dozen lines and that unknowable combination of pharmaceuticals in him), and at least one old woman had her common decency compromised by stunned observance of said best sex of his life.

Someone is drowned in the Liffey; he doesn't remember the man's face.

Anyway, they were only playing. Is it his fault humans are so delicate?

Tim dies twice, once by vomit (terrible thing to choke on), the second by his own hand, when they decide, giggling, to shoot a bottle of bourbon off his head.

Enzo goes into some kind of convulsions, sweating out his vices, so they helpfully store him in the freezer of one of those twenty four hour stores of convenience, and hide behind a shelf of crisps waiting for the clerk to find him.

Tim keeps having to stifle his giggles.

"Shh, darling," he whispers, trying not to laugh.

There is the occasional patter of the late-night customer, the bored clacking of the clerk's nails, that restless shifting of all the little miscellaneous products which are at the mercy of employees' pressing boredom.

The tension has gone out of the wait, so Tim begins kissing his neck.

For a moment he retains his vigilance, trying to keep his mind divided, the one half attentive, the other titillated, but you know him, to anything with the prefix 'tit' goes his attention, so he turns round and grabs Tim by the hips and they all but collapse onto the crisps shelf, leaning all their weight against it as they kiss each other frantically, all the finesse sanded off by drink and drug.

One of the shelves collapses; the crisp packets avalanche across the floor.

Tim steps on three of them, trying to get out of the way in time, and falls back against a rack of biscuits.

He blurts out several laughing curses righting it.

"You ok?" the clerk calls out, narrowing her eyes at them when they peek out from behind the shelf.

"We're just looking, thank you."

"Thanks a million," Tim adds, clearing his throat when another laugh threatens. He presses his lips together and awkwardly scratches the back of his neck.

"Well, what the hell was that, then?"

"Don't worry, darling, we'll pay for it all. And clean it up. Would you mind adding one of the lollies out of that freezer near the front to my tab? I'll just start on this, then," he tells her innocently, and bends to begin gathering up crisp packets, watching her out of the corner of his eye.

She's not pleased, but it isn't as though she's anything else to do, so with a little huff she rounds the counter, and clicks across the floor to the freezer where Enzo lies in blue repose beneath some of those horrid microwave chips and several cartons of Ben and Jerry's.

They abandon all pretense of their clean-up to watch her prize up the lid.

She drops it with a scream.

Enzo is collected before the Garda can arrive, Tim laughing so hard he stumbles on three cobblestones, trying to navigate through his tears, and nearly drops Enzo's feet.

"Fuck me," he wheezes as they sprint down an alley, Enzo's thawing corpse here and there offering to the cobblestones a loud plink to nearly drown the whispers of the pursuing cops.

"Well, somebody had a good night," a man calls from the entrance to Temple Bar, and Tim almost vomits up the rest of his Jameson at the look that follows when suddenly there materializes behind them a good half dozen Garda.

The Temple Bar district has shed a good portion of its tourists at this hour of the morning, but they've still a few drunken stragglers to push through, and him bearing more than half of Enzo's awkwardly-positioned weight as Tim succumbs to another fit of laughter, tripping over the curb they hurtle.

"Coming through, lads!" he hollers, and drops Enzo's feet. "Aw, shit, lad! Keep going! They're right behind us!"

It's surely a curious scene to those not too sloshed to look up from their mugs and spot some tipsy idiot making increasingly clumsy grabs for the heels of a man who looks suspiciously pale, even for Ireland, while his friend labors on flawlessly, both his hands still snugly beneath the frosty armpits, half the city's police force in torch-brandishing pursuit.

* * *

Next day Enzo has pressing business with a particularly bendy lady friend, so he decides to put to use some of that gentlemanly conduct Elijah spent untold centuries beating into him, and takes Tim on a date.

They're sharing a hotel room, but he knocks politely on the door anyway, and waits with his present behind his back for Tim to open it.

"I stole this especially for you," he tells him, and holds up the pistol he plucked from a militant's stash he went all the way to Derry to loot, a little squeeze of shyness suddenly in his breast as Tim turns it in his hands.

"You didn't have to do that."

He looks down with a smile at his toes. "Do you like it?"

"It's grand, me love," Tim replies, and when he looks up, the whole face is lit up beneath the hat.

* * *

They kick in the doors of the Bank of Ireland just before opening hours.

"I'm going to need whatever money you have in the cash drawers. And the safe," he compels one employee while Tim holds the other five at gun point. "Now, darlings, I can't say you won't be hurt. I don't like to make promises I might not be able to keep." He hops up onto the counter, and holds out his arms to either side. "But I promise we're all going to have a good time."

The doors are blocked.

Two of them make it; the rest do not.

Celebratory blow jobs for everyone!

Well, not those damp survivors who look just a little too troubled for any more fun. Humans can only take so much, after all.

But he's sure they enjoy watching.

In front of Trinity College, they empty their bag of euros into the air, and watch friend turn suddenly upon friend, all those inventive uses of what puny human tools they can transform into weapons.

He sees one old woman skewer a young student's hand with the tip of her umbrella.

Someone is shoved into the street, and splattered all over the front of a bus.

"I feel just as Robin Hood must have."

"Well, there's your good deed for the year," Tim says, and claps him on the back.

"Didn't I just commit one? I'm a more humane human than most humans themselves."

Tim grabs him by the head, and bends down to kiss it, keeping his chin on the spot for a moment afterward, and at least having himself a good smirk over his superior height if he's got no other advantages to flaunt. "Come on, then, Saint Kol. I'll compel you a drink."

* * *

It takes a mere three days for at least one of his escapees to repay his kindness.

Tim is watching the television in their room when he comes in one blustery Thursday afternoon, shaking the rain from his hair, and from his beard wiping those little leftovers of a particularly tender snack.

"Your handiwork, I'm guessing?" Tim asks, and inclines his head at the screen.

"-found with half his face eaten away just days after the escape from Central Mental Hospital of Liam Cullen, notorious for his 2008 attack of a local Dublin man, in which he stabbed and removed the victim's penis, and then…consumed it."

He smiles.

He ducks back out into the rain with Tim at his side, just to test the atmosphere, to revel in that strange weight which enough people can lend to the very air when they have to the very roots of them been shaken by this fundamental truth of mankind.

The sheep is always a mask, darlings.

It's happened not far from their hotel, happily; just a quick jaunt round the corner and there's the bright tape, and the grim Garda, and in clumps those huddled rubber-neckers who challenge the rain just for their dose of tragedy.

He feels the whoosh of Enzo's arrival against his neck. "You're a fast worker, mate."

"I've got good instincts for which ones will pay out quickly. I'm handy at horse races." He claps once. "Speaking of which! Anyone want to head down to the track for the evening? We could steal a few of the horses. Take them steeple chasing." He mimes clearing a few hedges with his hand.

Tim has taken a step back, so that it's just he and Enzo shoulder to shoulder now, and slips both hands into his pockets, hunching the broad shoulders as he always does when he's out of sorts.

"What's wrong with you?" he asks, turning to lightly kick Tim's ankle with the toe of his boot.

"Nothing," he says, and takes out his cigarettes. "I don't like horses, that's all."

"You mean you're scared of them."

"Sure, I'm the eejit for wantin' to keep a safe distance between meself and something can kick the bollocks into me throat because it didn't like its shadow."

He nudges Enzo's shoulder with his own. "Let's gently peer pressure him into stealing the first one."

Tim scowls at him, unlit cigarette in his mouth, and his hands searching out the elusive lighter among his various pockets.

He unearths it from his own, and holds it out.

"You could ask, before you take it."

"I could. I prefer a light scolding. How are things with oh-what's-her-name-again?" he asks Enzo, stealing Tim's hat and settling it rakishly on his own head. Keeps a few of the larger drops out of his eyes, at least.

He skips back a step when Tim tries to take it from him.

"Still bendy," Enzo tells him. "She has a few friends, actually."

"Just as bendy?" he asks, ducking Tim's grab once more.

"Oh yeah," Enzo replies, with an intriguing touch of appreciation in his voice. "And everything's also still supernaturally…bouncy for its age. Actually, if you're interested, they're throwing a party tonight. Something like a 'rave', they told me?"

"No party starts until I get there." He grabs Tim's hands and traps them against his chest. "What do you think, darling? Shall we watch these nubile mummies play the trampoline to Enzo's…tramopliner?" He cocks his head. "How old are they, anyway?"

"Somewhere in the 300 range. None of them would tell me exactly."

"I like my meat a little fresher," he says, and roughly slaps Tim's ass. "But I'd be happy to watch." He gives Enzo that particular smile once more, and the slow pass of the eyes which lingers in all the right spots.

* * *

Enzo's ladies have commandeered a bar in one of the rougher areas of Dublin, a neighborhood which a mortal man might turn up his collar at, and hurry his way through all those premonitory flinchings of the neck which always senses first the tiptoe of the reaper.

But he flashes the bundle of euros he's pinched from he doesn't remember where, and twirls Tim's watch like any idiot sightseer, because what's the fun, darlings, in wearing his immortality in those substandard tints of the mortal eye?

He snorts nearly six grams from some man's eternally firm stomach, and coaxes Tim into licking a shot from his belly button.

There's the blurring of the walls, the strangely saturated faces with their blares of red lips, blue eyes, the nervous jolting of his heart and all the hairs on edge every time he is brushed by a wandering hand, the floor revolves, the faces smear-

He sniffs another line.

There isn't anything for it but to take off his shirt (too many admirers, darlings, with all their centuries to mourn), and spinning it above his head, he tosses it across the bar and throws his arms over his head.

Enzo is nicely competent at staying on the beat, even with a glass of whatever cocktail it is he's been abusing all night in his hand, not a drop spilled as they both jostle against one another, hands in the air, Enzo's high glittering in his eyes and warm in his cheeks, the floor wobbling, wobbling, till he must place his feet a little more carefully, and grip the hips of the girl who's clearly been waiting all night for him to take such initiative.

She leans back against him, and loops her arms round his neck.

He sets his chin on her shoulder and jerks his head at Tim, who is sitting by himself at the bar nursing what isn't nearly enough whiskey to stir his party beast, as they say.

He thinks.

"Come on, Tim."

He shakes his head and then ducks it, shifting his feet a bit on the stool. "No thanks."

"Come on."

He laughs a little. "I can't dance."

He takes the girl by the wrist, and spins her under his arm, her hair whipping him, raising little goosebumps everywhere it touches down, and over her shoulder Tim's eyes, so bloody blue, the lashes not merely black but onyx, raven, whatever cheap thesaurus violation now escapes his muzzy head, the spots of alcohol like cosmetic in his cheeks, the lips freshly apple-poisoned-

"You're very handsome," he calls out, and with the girl's back against him once more, he props his hands on both her shoulders and crooks either finger at Tim.

"Oh, sure, and you're caked off your bin."

"I don't know what you've just said to me." He spins the girl again.

She gives his chest a thorough groping.

Tim does not appear overly pleased.

"But I do know you're very handsome, I'm very handsome, we should combine our handsomeness right now, on this dance floor. There will be a spotlight. It will highlight these just right." He gestures to his abs. "And everyone will applaud us, and throw their panties at us."

"I told you I can't dance, you lunk."

"Yes you can. I've seen you."

"Not like that. I don't do the-" He flaps his hand around. "-the arms in the air, just fucking about dancing. I'm too long. I look like I'm having a seizure."

He hears Enzo let out a cheer behind him, and something shatters.

Onstage, two men are feeding from a woman, who has a hand down both their trousers.

The men taste her blood off one another's tongues.

The song fades away; he feels the next begin its infant vibrations in the floor.

There is a shifting of the crowd, the press of sweaty body against sweaty body, he catches another whiff of cocaine, the brisk sting of some apple cocktail trod into the floorboards, that roaring of the blood which, up in so many throats, and brisk in the breasts, smites, Zeus-like, his ears.

He lets go of the girl and turns round to dance with Enzo for a moment.

There is a girl to either side of him, and a drink in either of his hands.

They pass them back and forth, and he finds when he sips from one that they're spiked with something he doesn't recognize, and shudders his way through a jolt that reaches his very tiptoes, the veins for a moment surfacing underneath his eyes, and the nape hairs staticy with his pleasure.

He leaps round in time to the music to face Tim once more.

"Tim. Tiiiiim. Timothy. Patrick. Pat. Paddy."

Tim looks down at his feet, but he's laughing.

"I don't know what to do with 'O'Sullivan'." He joins in one of those shrill "whooooo!"s which originate who knows precisely where, and catch like fever.

He slicks his hair back and glides his way through something Youtube tells him is called a 'moon walk'.

He plants one foot and pivots crisply, pointing at Tim with both fingers, and jabbing them in time to the music, throwing his arms up once more and leaning now to either side with those little pulses that a lesser man could never pair with that Latin gyration of the hips that has felled far more pious men.

Tim shakes his head, but he's laughing.

"Come on, darling." He goes back to gesturing with his fingers. "Come on, Tim. Tim. Tim. Timmy."

"Ah, fine, fine," Tim says, and knocks back the rest of his drink.

Tim blurs into the crowd.

He tosses up his arms in triumph and blasts off another "Whoo!" in Tim's ear that must nearly take the poor thing off.

"You're off tonight," he says, draping his arms round Tim's neck, letting his fingers tangle in the little kick of hair at the nape.

"I'm all right."

"All right. Then loosen up." He grabs Tim's arms and flaps them about for a moment, hitting some nearby girl in the face, to which Tim stammers out an apology, and then cuffs him good-naturedly upside the head.

He sets Tim's hands on his hips, just above the waistband of his jeans, so he can feel the fingers warm on his bare skin, and savor how the cocaine has flayed the first layer of him, and left his nerves singing at a brush.

He smells the hot pulse of the woman whose boyfriend has set her roughly on the bar, and kneels now with his head between her legs, teeth in her thigh, the sweaty musk of her arousal, the under layers of hard alcohol, soft vanilla-

He watches the pulse in Tim's neck, and imagines what it would be to suck at it, to feel the fine tendons flex beneath his lips, and the lean hips push into his own, experience with all his fresh senses the cock stirring against his own, and the hands clench holes in his hips-

He trails the very point of his tongue up the side of Tim's neck, and listens to his breathing change.

The crowd knocks them apart for a moment.

The lights blind him for the three startled seconds it takes him to blink the spots from his eyes, and then another flash of the strobe paints their faces in carnival relief, he sees a syringe change hands, a man latch onto his partner's neck, the blind ecstasy which for a moment grips a woman's face in the blissful aftermath of her latest line, and he bumps once more into Tim.

He feels the hands on his face a moment after they touch him.

He loses all his rhythm when Tim kisses him, and for a moment just stands with his head back, blinking up at him.

Someone presses the needle into his hand.

He injects Tim first when he holds out his arm, missing the vein twice while Tim sucks on his earlobe, and he feels the reverberations all the way into his toes.

It's vampire blood, he realizes as he presses the needle smoothly into his skin and pushes what he hasn't already emptied into Tim through the vein. Not as intimate as taking it directly from the throat, but the rush is instant, he feels his head reel, his cock twitch, the bar tilts, Tim grows a halo beneath his hat.

He doesn't quite remember the rest of the night.

He does recall racing Tim through approximately ten grams of cocaine, and licking he knows not whose blood from Tim's stomach.

The hotel afterward, another needle, the brief fire of the cocaine in his nostrils, and somewhere in the furthest depths of his fuzziest memories, Tim's cock inside him, and prior, past, he doesn't remember, but he does see the two of them stripped to the skin, drinking from Enzo, while on the bed his bendy lady friends rabidly enjoy one another.

Some unidentifiable knot on the bed, his limbs entangled with a stranger's, Tim kissing his neck, what he mistily identifies as a mouth on his cock, and a clit under his tongue-

He comes to beside four people he has never seen before.

There is a dead woman on the floor.

Tim is still high.

No one else is yet conscious, but the dead woman gets quite a show, if he says so himself.

* * *

It's later discovered they did not go home with Enzo, but after those ten grams rampaged their way through what at best guess was a good dozen pubs, three of which they were ousted from for indecent liberties with one another and, in one memorable instance, a particularly discomfited man in a leprechaun costume.

The dead woman Enzo can't identify.

The man they picked up from a gay bar.

But he is flattered, boys, that they pictured him in the very depths of their depravities.

"Was the man we picked up from the gay bar ugly?" he asks with concern.

"I wouldn't have taken him home," Enzo replies.

"Did I fuck him?"

"No, no, lad; I remember most of it. You only fucked me," Tim assures him, and he lets out a breath. "I think someone had your cock in their mouth, though, and there was a lass- Jaysus, boyo, we're not good addicts."

"But I didn't fuck the ugly man? Was _he_ sucking my cock?"

"No, no, wait- I think it was me."

"Who had his cock sucked by the ugly man? That's a relief."

" _No_ \- who sucked _your_ cock, eejit."

"You were kissing my neck. I remember that.

"But I don't think you're remembering it in sequence. We were fecking round, we did drink from some lad, and he drank from us-"

"So there was another vampire there?"

Enzo shakes his head, looking amused. "I was with you up until you left for the hotel. There was no other vampire, mate."

"So we imagined him, then?" Tim asks.

"You're _sure_ there was another man, and he was ugly?"

Tim points at him. "I told you not to take that whole bloody bottle of pills you stole off that man in Temple Bar! You didn't even know what they were."

"You stole them, darling."

Tim opens his mouth, snaps it shut, fusses with his hat. "Jaysus. Jaysus, lad."

* * *

Ah, he does look better, with the fresh shine of Ireland on him, and the brother gone from his shoulders.

And walking the boardwalk railing with just his hands, legs straight above him, the one hand preceding the other, just as certain sure as the sober boots on the cobblestones, and all the little wee ones gathering for a gawp, holding their breaths for the Liffey's triumphant taste.

Enzo joins him for most such shows, so he leaves the lads to their preening, walking away down the boardwalk to smoke in peace, and turning himself round from time to time to mother hen the worst of their antics.

"Don't you be stabbin' him!"

Worse than a child, the fecker.

But, ah, he does look happy. When a man's fresh-polished with it, and shines from his eyes and his cheeks, you know it's no actor's sham, and sure the heart's struck nearly clean out of you by it.

Even if-

Oh, lad.

He sees the eyes you're making at their new friend, and do you think he doesn't know what it means for him, then?

He draws in the smoke, bit more shaky than the last hit, and holds it in his lungs.

You have a good time with the timid lad, until you don't.

He turns up his collar.

The clouds let a trickle down his neck, the wind takes a swipe for his hat, the eejits get a good shaking from this midday gust, and tangle the legs with a laugh.

He pulls his hat a little lower and strolls away with the hands in his pockets, rolling the fag from one side of his mouth to the other.

* * *

"It's called 'youtube'. You can find just about anything you want on here, except porn. You can find that too, they just normally take it down pretty quickly."

Kol tips the laptop he lifted off some lad in a Starbucks toward Enzo. "You see, we type in, for instance…'Donald Trump singing wig' and voila, darling- just look at all those results."

"Who's Donald Trump?" Enzo asks, leaning over the table to squint at the laptop.

"Donald Trump would be so disappointed in you."

He shakes his head with a laugh, knocks back a good pull of the Guinness he's set on the edge of the pool table, adjusts his hat, eyes the cue ball and that pesky striped little six that's eluded all his best shots, the smug motherfucker.

"Now type in 'pole dancing bear'. Go on," Kol encourages.

" _Fuck_ me," he blurts out when the cue ball glances off the six and gently taps instead the three. You go on and _fuck_ yourself now, do you hear him, then?

Floor must be uneven, of course, he thinks, and rocks the table a little to test it. Ah, yeah, you can hear the little clunk earlier on the one side than the other, and Mick behind the bar there, he's got the conspiracy glint in his eye, you can smell the scheming nearly thick as the beer.

"What the hell are you doing, Tim?" Kol calls out to him from the other side of the pub, shooting him an amused look and lounging back in the booth with his hands behind his head.

"The floor's fucked. It's not level."

"No, darling, you're just awful." He nods toward the table. "Come and look at this."

"I'm concentrating."

"On what? You're playing yourself and still losing."

He extends his middle finger. "Why don't you sit on this and twist until it tears something?"

"You don't have to get touchy, darling. It's not going to make you any better at pool."

"Fuck you," he says amicably enough, and leans over the table once more, measuring the heft of his stick, and with a squint of his eyes judging the distance between the cue ball and that cunt of a six.

"Cat call him," Kol suggests to Enzo. "He always gets all red and it ruins his focus. But don't sound too serious about it, or else I'll get jealous and have to kill you."

"Thanks, but I'm not tight roping that line, mate."

Kol wolf whistles. "What's a boy like you doing in a place like this? I want to lick everywhere that makes you sweat."

"Shut up, you."

"Excellent comeback, darling. How does the next part go? Is it one of those 'your mama' jokes?"

He waves him off with the stick, readjusting his hat, and giving that six the eye, fasten down on your knickers, lad, it's him and you, and he's the fresh crick cracked out of his neck, and they sing the ballads of his grip-

Well and the beau seems to like it well enough.

"You don't even know what a 'your mama' joke is, lad," he says, and fires away.

" _Fuck_!" he snaps.

"Your mama is so fat she sat on a rainbow and Skittles popped out of it. Also, she was better at pool than you."

The bartender's away helping some lad along to at least the two sheets, so he picks up that six and hurls it right at Kol's head, and of course the hand flashes out nimbly and catches it a good few inches from his face, the smug shit grin splitting the handsome cheeks.

Kol hooks his wrist in a perfect hoop shot that nets the six in the left corner pocket.

"I hate you," he sighs.

"Neither one of us believes that, darling."

"Fine. But don't you be talking about me ma."

"She would have liked me," Kol muses. "I'm always a big hit with parents."

"Right. You must charm the pants right off them."

"Actually, yes. There was one woman -this must have been, oh, I can't even remember how long ago it was- you could see right away where she'd got her looks soon as you glimpsed her mother and father. Anyway, they all loved me. And I do mean _loved_ me."

He cocks one of his eyebrows at Kol, leaning on his stick. "Three students at Trinity College the first time I enrolled, back in the 20s. They were all straight, big strapping jocks, the lot of them."

Kol cocks his head. "And how did you manage that? I mean, other than the obvious, which is 'just look at you'."

"Don't you be kissin' me arse. You won't be smoothin' over your jabs that easily."

Kol mimes a prick in his mouth, and smirks at him.

" _Anyway_ , they were always picking on me, and I got sick of it."

"So you made them all gay?" Enzo asks.

"I taught him well," Kol adds.

"Will you be telling the story for me, then? I joined the boxing club, and beat the right shit out of them. When you do that enough times, a man either kills you, or he respects you."

"So little Timmy Underdog boxed his way to admiration, and then in a twist worthy of only the best gay porns, they all took turns bending over a locker room bench for you."

"Am I telling the story, or are you?"

"I've already told it in my head. You massaged a bottle of oil all over your chest, while they emptied their water bottles over their heads and stood like statues as the droplets highlighted all their best gym work. Then they formed an orderly circle around you, and you all took turns making out with one another, very slowly, very leisurely, while you stroked one another's cocks. Then you fucked them all, realized with a pang in your heart that none of them could possibly measure up to a certain handsome English boy, and ate them. The end." He shifts a little in his seat.

"Is that how all your stories about me sexual conquests end?"

Kol wiggles his eyebrows at him. "I don't see you with any of them now."

"All right, boys, stop flirting. I need to know what 'Puh-wa-ned' means." Enzo interrupts, tilting the laptop screen toward Kol.

He glances over at it. "Oh; it's pronounced 'powned', darling." He blurs to the pool table, snatches the stick for himself, and in half a second clears the whole bloody surface, and giving to the chalked end of the stick a whiff of the cooling breath, he straightens up with a wink. "It's what I've done to Tim just now."

Then there's the hands on his collar, and a smacker to the lips leaves him a bit glazed, and Kol tells them, "This place is dead. Let's go somewhere we can find things to break," and saunters right out the door.

* * *

The bartender smiles widely at her, of course.

They're always besotted on sight, silly little humans.

Not that she blames them, of course.

Just look at her hair.

"Did two idiots pass through here?" she asks him without compulsion, leaning just perfectly on the counter, so her arms present her breasts with even more perk than nature has lent and never taken away.

He laughs. "You're going to have to be more specific than that, I'm afraid."

"One of them is Irish, tall, about twenty or so, dresses like an old man. He'd have an Englishman with him, a few inches or so shorter, looks like an insufferable ass?"

"Doesn't every Englishman?" he asks, giving her a sly little smile as he wipes down the counter. "I've been to England. You'll have a much better time of it here, lass."

She touches his arm, and leans forward with a smile, looking up from beneath her eyebrows just as Nik has for centuries snared supernatural and man alike. "I'm certain I will. But first I need to know if they came through here. It's very important."

"Had a couple of men in just an hour or so ago who could have been the ones you're looking for. Big lad, playing pool in the corner, had on one of those old man hats. Didn't pay a whole lot of attention to him, but he was talking to someone in one of the booths. There were three of them, though, not two."

"Three?"

"Yeah. The place won't start picking up till later tonight, so there were only half a dozen or so in at the time, so I remember them. There were two men sitting in that booth over there." He points helpfully. "They had a laptop. Ordered just a couple of drinks. They both had English accents. Then there was the Irish lad; he had a Guinness. Good man."

"Did you hear a name or anything like that? Perhaps where they were heading after this?"

"One of them called the Irish lad 'Tim'. I don't know where they were off to."

She gives him her sunniest smile. "Thank you. You've been very helpful."

For that she kills him quickly.

And Mother says there isn't a humane bone left in her body.

* * *

He remembers when the _Helga_ sailed on up the Liffey bold as your brass bollocks.

That was when Dublin realized, oh shitsey daisy, these British lads mean business.

There was that day what the good and faithful optimistics of Ireland call 'rain shine'; you could see the Liffey confused with it, here the dimpling of the drops, there the sun flirting with that green and murksome surface, all coy, so, you could tell the ol' bitch was after breaking a man's heart, and himself just sitting on the railing of the Ha'Penny, watching her flee before this awesome portent of Dublin's own End Days.

He was mostly still human himself, and he thought, with Kol and the mother still fresh inside him, oh, the feckless mortality of all his bloody favorites.

He had himself a cigarette.

He checked out the arse of the lad who scrambled out of the GPO after his friend.

He watched the guns open with a roar, felt beneath him the trembling of the railing, heard from inside Dublin's tenements the shrieking of the dumbstruck mothers.

Over the side of the railing went the cigarette.

Onto the balls of his new and acrobatic feet, balancing there fine as you please, hands in the pockets, hat cinematically rakish on his head.

He'd never seen any sort of building defeated like that before, you stood there looking up at them all day, they started to fade into that sort of peripheral mist by which all life passes you by, if you're not careful, there was the eternal shadow crouching on your shoulders, and altering in the sweetest of grannies the cut of the cheekbones, so's in the one eye the perdition of Hyde, and in the other the fresh gullibility of Jekyll, and then-

Oh, Jaysus, he heard the loudest sound of all his twenty-five years.

He saw one of the flat windows explode, and the curtains billow in this artificial wind, and he'd fucking swear a left nut to you, Dublin herself flinched, old stones, they _know_ , a fine sight smarter than 85% of your damn voting public anyway, and Dublin, oh, she felt it in her bones.

He was on his 18th cigarette when the GPO gave a dusty gray sigh, and buckled.

Like a fecked cake, he thought, and started to cry.

And can you picture it, some old granny, she comes toddling on out to him with a blanket, and shoos him down off the railing, and he's got the snot smeared practically down to his knees, and his eyes blind with the soot, he forgets to smell her neck, and slaver after her blood, he's led to the stoop of some shop, and sat down like a child while she fetches what tea and biscuits haven't been pinched by the looters.

"She'll come through it; she'll come through it," the old woman keeps telling him, resettling the blanket on his shoulders, and making sure the tea is, if not piping, at least enough to warm the cherry out of his nose.

"My son's in there," she tells him as the GPO catches fire. "She'll come through it."

Father, give me a sign, and I'll wrap me cock in rosaries and drain the wild goats out the Ring of Kerry. They're real fuckers anyway, he thought.

And he did wait.

The old woman caught a stray bullet, and he tried to think of the goats, and how Jesus, if he disapproved of all that lying with man and whatnot, must surely frown at the eating of His most pious followers, but, ah, reason with any starving lad.

She was a bit stale. He remembered Kol mentioning that, how the old ones were always a little more…chewy, you had to shake down the first sips, smack the lips, let the nape skin shiver just a little like any boy trying to get down his cold remedies, till the instincts took you by the bollocks and gave you a right good shake and said listen here, lad, don't you be turning your nose up at a meal.

Children somewhere are starving.

He held her nicely enough afterward, with his wet face buried in her shawl.

He takes a draw from his fag, and blows it out away from the boardwalk, letting his right leg dangle down off the railing, toward the water.

He was still so bloody young.

He didn't know, cities don't die like that, nationality doesn't die like that, history will never build a big enough gun, no mother will birth the required ambition, and those bloody Irish- go on and knock them down, they'll take your fecking head off.

The cigarette's got a final exhale in it, and then he flicks it over the side, into the Liffey.

He hears a cheer behind him, turns to see the ridiculous boat lorry with its load of tourists proudly wearing their Viking helmets, who point to him and wave.

He feels, occasionally, one of those fond pangs you get for eejit children when the humans look at him like he's just a lad, oh a daft one to be sure, dressed like their grandfather, but harmless enough, handsome young man, and puppy-like in the eyes, you could trust your sister to him, or take him home to the mother.

The boat lurches away into traffic; the city swallows their shrieks.

He hops down from the railing, dodges the young man who comes begging for a euro, in right bits, you can tell he is, and away down the boardwalk he goes, making for O'Connell bridge, where the pedestrians are shoulder to shoulder, and he can see in their midst a young thief flitting between pockets, lifting anything the tourists haven't nailed down.

Sun's out today, and all manner of white-cheeked peekaboo playing about the arse end of the shorts. They'll be sporting the Irishman's tan tomorrow; thank Christ he's dead.

He rolls up his sleeves.

O'Connell Street melds smoothly into Westmoreland, and he lets himself be jostled gently along, past Trinity College, past the Irish Whiskey Museum, up onto Grafton where there are the lads in their black paint, perfectly motionless, some of the tourists stopping for a gasp when there's a cry let out by the quickest of them: "No, they're real people!" and the locals on about their business, never you mind the fiddlers, the jugglers, the beggars, here's Jim with his accordion and oh Jaysus, Benny's back with the violin, and the man from Bolivia tottering round on his sticks just outside Stephen's Green.

He sees a lad depriving some chatty tourist of her purse contents while she gobs on to her friend, and is that how a gentleman's after acting, then?

He punches the man in the face, and snags the wallet before it hits the cobblestones.

There are a few cries when the man drops, and the best of the Samaritans rushing to his side, wondering was it the heart felled him (he landed that hook right quick, and anyway, who would go punching a man in broad daylight like that, when he's not got enough pub in him to deserve it), and bless her dumb heart, the lass just blathering right on to her friend, never the wiser to her lighter purse, her cursing thief, his bleeding knuckles.

He slips the wallet back into her purse.

But as Fate would decree it, he's pressed in by a group of fellas in fine suits, and shuttled along down the road trapped here where there are too many eyes for the quick nip up to one of the empty side streets, and the lass' voice muffles everything fine and decent in this rare yellow day.

"I know, but some of their signs, like, aren't even in English. And yesterday I'm trying to get a sandwich, and I can barely understand the dumb bitch anyway, and then she asks me if I want crisps with it, and she holds up a package of chips. They're fucking _chips_ , bitch. Did you know their pancakes aren't really pancakes, either? They're more, like, crepes or something. And if I'm going to eat crepes, I'd rather do it in Paris, you know, not some buttfuck nowhere hole where everything looks like mold. What shit. My parents agree to pay for my whole trip abroad, and they can't even bother to send me to like, France, I get goddamned _Ireland_ and I'm supposed to act like this is some kind of opportunity of a lifetime?"

He slides his forefinger and middle carefully back into her purse, and helps himself to the wallet once more, lifting it silently between these two fingers.

The passport he leaves.

Christ forbid she encounter any difficulties on her way _out_ the fucking door.

He rifles through the wallet, takes the whole mess of the euros and the dollars and distributes them throughout his pockets, leaves the cards in their slots, walks away with his hands in his pockets.

Kol has fecked off somewhere with Enzo, but he's left three voicemails and a text detailing their rampage through the city, if and he's up for a bit of fun.

The latest places them at Panti's, a gay bar down Capel street, where he finds them drunk on cocktails and dancing with three lesbians.

"You're Lindsay Meyer today," he says, and flips the wallet at Kol, who still catches it without a fumble, pissed off his ass and with either arm around a lesbian.

"Have you been robbing people without me?"

"Just charge something really expensive to the cards."

Kol has fished the girl's license from one of the pockets. "Oooh- nice, Timothy. Is she still among us?"

"Yes."

One of the lesbians is drunkenly trying to dance with him.

Kol pulls her back by the collar of her shirt. "No, no, darling. He needs to be very drunk for that. And it would help enormously if you had a cock."

"I'm transitioning, if that helps," one of the girls says, giving him a wink.

He ducks his head and scratches at the back of his neck. "No, no, that's all right. I just came here to talk to me friend."

"Friend, friend, or _friend_ friend?" another one wants to know.

"We're fucking," Kol elaborates, swaying just a little.

"Oh, this is the one you were telling us about, then," one of the girls says, and hands him another drink.

He knocks it back smoothly.

"I'd fuck him if I were straight," the girl on Kol's left says in approval.

"Right?"

"Who are we today?" Enzo asks, having listened in from the bar, and popping over now to take a look at the wallet Kol is going through, his arms still hooked around the necks of the girls.

"Tim robbed some girl called Lindsay Meyer."

"You're a pickpocket?"

"Usually just when someone really deserves it, darling. Maybe she was taller than him?"

"Or she asked him out."

"Oh, you lads stop teasing him. You've got him quite red enough, anyway, you arseholes."

"Thank you for your concern, darling, but I don't take orders. Not even when their bearer is astonishingly beautiful."

"And gay," the girl replies, cocking an eyebrow at him. She smacks him across the chest with the back of her hand. "And don't you be flirting with me in front of your boyfriend!"

"Well I'm off," he interrupts, before Kol can respond, and pivots round to step back out into the sunshine.

Kol has followed him into the street. "Are you mad at me?"

He turns round to face him, the hands in the pockets once more, one of them fiddling with the watch, click tick click, but he knows the lad's wise to that, so he leaves off his fussing and makes a fist of his awkward fingers, wondering can his friend scent that little cold trickle of sweat down his neck, and hear the chatter of the old bones knocking together in their shaking fists?

He's just watching you outgrow him in little stretches, is all.

And he doesn't know-

Can he watch the heaving of the grave dirt over the old friendship, and see, maybe time doesn't take a man, death doesn't take a man, but sure you never escape that human defeat, there will always be another, greener, shinier, _better_?

"I'm not mad at you," he says quietly.

"Why are you running off?"

He shrugs the shoulders so they nearly touch his ears, hands still in his pockets. "I just want to explore the city. It's been a while since I was here, and Dublin is one of me favorite places."

"So I'll go with you."

He sighs. "You're having fun here."

"I'll have fun wherever you're going."

He would have the eyes of a puppy shooed into the corner without his pat, the fucker.

"Just stay, Kol. You're drunk, you've a wallet that isn't yours, the world is your oyster. Anyway, she was a real asshole. Buy yourself something nice."

"Why don't we go shopping together?"

"Oh, I've enough cash on me to keep me busy for a while. She was carrying almost a thousand euro. You two have a nice day, all right? I'll see you later, at the hotel."

But he goes instead to Christchurch Cathedral, with the copy of _Bleak House_ has got all the little white wrinkles of love on the spine, and is dog eared at all his favorite passages.

Man was lonely, so God put a book in his hand.

Dear Father who art maybe in heaven, he used to believe that.

But when was the last goddamned time you did a thing for bloody _any_ of them, when his stupid shitbrained self had the rosary round his fifteen-year-old prick so that Jesus might smite the stirrings for Sean McNulty- ah, no, he just had to shuffle round the mother, sweating through her usual maternal check-ups, how was the job treating him, then, and was he eating all right- yeh, yeh, sure Ma, and then the choke down of the breakfast and off out the door, heart in the throat, for sure he must have something of the devil in his eyes now, and oh his poor, poor mother, who reared him just right- sinless white she were, and what unjust sentence was this, Satan in her own child, breathing the flame and tingles when the boys passed him by and maybe just a half-arsed tickle for pretty Suzie in her ruffles.

And then he asked you-

He asked you for his friend.

And he has him back, he has him back-

But he's still angry.

He sits in your pews pretending he likes the candles, he likes the smell of the wax melt and the soft rainbows of the stained windows, there's the grand lift of the organ music, you feel the chorus to your bones, there is always within you, from the smallest Slovak chapel to the grandest London cathedral, that slow hoarfrost of the peace when at first touch of the toes upon the stones, you feel the baptismal rainbow, the sanitization of white robe, devout organ-

And then he always eases himself down, and he remembers, he believed so hard.

And you just left him swinging.

His mother died 103 years ago, and every birthday, he lays the old favorite peonies on the grave, and sits down to tell her oh, he went to so and so, Ma, the weather was grand, there's a new one swinging his prick round like a hammer, lousy fecking moustache on him, and can you believe, 1941, and still they're after invading Moscow at her most blustery.

He won't forget that, lad.

Don't be thinking anything of him running back here like so, he just doesn't know, where does a man go when he's loneliest, when he remembers forgetting is the slowest of all deaths, and Jaysus, you can die so many of them?

Will you be telling him, then?

Please?

* * *

He slips in quietly, though he knows Tim will hear him anyway, and sits in the very back pew.

Christchurch Cathedral has for hours shut its doors to the public, which, barred from its saints, turns to its sins. He has to shut his ears to their festivities, and focus instead on the faint hiss of the candle flames, and the various settlings which all old buildings undergo, the random pops of the foundation, those creaks of tortured ceiling tile, hassled by rain and wind.

There are clouds enough to stifle the moon tonight, but a distant streetlight spills its cheer over the tiles, and what corner hovers beyond its reach is wakened by the candles.

He likes to touch the pillars of such places, and imagine himself back through what stories the marble must have witnessed, and the benches have born.

But he hears that's for the introspective, so of course you won't tell.

He leans forward and drapes his arms over the pew in front of him, waiting for Tim to speak.

You can see the tension in the nape of his neck. The hair almost covers it, but the little curl at the end ruins it, kicking up off the white and vulnerable skin, so you can tell how the tendons have locked, and are struggling for what peace he has wrestled from these walls.

"You can talk or not," he says at last, keeping himself propped on the pew. "It's all right if you want to just be quiet."

The nape relaxes just a touch.

There's a heavier weight to silences in places such as this; the candles are suddenly thunderous, the distant street light sizzles with that still incomprehensible magic of technology, the rain pings a sudden handful of grapeshot off the windows.

He listens to Tim's breathing, and laces his fingers together, setting the point of his chin on the back of the pew in front of him.

"Did you have a nice shopping trip?"

"Not really. Oh, she's completely ruined, darling, don't worry about that. But I thought I might come back to find the hotel room empty."

He hears the nervous thumbing of whatever book Tim has in his hands, and sits upright once more, bouncing one of his legs.

"You don't like Enzo."

"He's fine."

"Well, there's only one other option, darling, and I'd prefer you didn't like Enzo. No offense to him. Good man. Almost as big of a hit with the ladies as I am."

Tim slips down a little in his seat, he hears the shush of trousers on wood, the head dips, the hat is lifted, the bangs are carefully sifted, and combed flat once more.

He bounces his leg again.

The book is ruffled once more, the streetlight flickers, Ireland discharges another angry handful against the roof.

"All right. I said you didn't have to talk. Do you mind if I sit here for a while longer?"

Tim ducks his head again, and rubs the back of his neck. "I'm not mad at either of you. I just…" He shakes his head. "I just think maybe…he's going to…I don't know. Fuck." He sighs.

"Replace you?" he guesses. "Is that how I've made you feel?"

"I'm just whining, lad."

"No. You get to feel however you feel about it." He wets his lips, unlaces the fingers, folds them together once more. "I'm sorry."

Tim shifts so he is sitting sideways on the pew, one of his legs up on the bench, an arm draped along its back, turning so he's looking over his shoulder, out across all the benches between them.

He's got his sleeves turned back to the elbow, and picks at one of them now, rolling it down to his wrist.

"You just have to tell me-"

"I can't." Tim lifts his hands helplessly, lets them collapse back into his lap. "I can't. I just- I don't know what to say."

"You could start with something like, 'Kol, I feel like you're being an exclusionary prick'." He tries to catch Tim's eye so he can smile, and let him know with all a smile can convey where words fail, it's going to be smoothed over, but his friend shakes his head, and tips it back to instead look at the ceiling.

He wonders, what is it a man finds in a ceiling, that he directs his heaviest griefs there, and lies in breathless anticipation of its counsel?

"I can't just go up to a man and ask him, 'Hey, there, you wouldn't be getting tired of being me friend, now would you?' I'm afraid of what he'd say. I don't have those kinds of bollocks, Kol. I don't want to know. Not like that, not bang on the mouth, with a man looking you right in the eyes, and you can see in him what you already knew, but for a little while hid from yourself." He flicks his eyes down from the ceiling, and cuts them over the pews between them. "You don't know what it is, to have words just stick in you. I don't mean it badly. Fresh out of the daughter's bed, you could talk your way right into the mother's." He smiles a little.

He clasps his hands between his knees now, and bounces both his legs, one after the other, vibrating the pew just slightly, his tongue coming out once more to return what moisture nerves have drank from his lips.

His hands burn through his jeans.

He chafes the sweat of his palms onto his knees.

"You mean how I can't say it, you know what I'm talking about, because it never ends the way I want it to. It ends." He shrugs with his hands, and looks up to find his own answers in the ceiling.

"I wanted love to be like me. I wanted it to last forever." He looks down at his hands, feels them like ice against his knees, he thinks, Nik, Bekah, Elijah, any one of you could have changed it- you could have shown him-

He shakes his head. "It's like a curse." He laughs, but it's one of those laughs, which are not really laughs at all. "You know, I gave up once, and I tried to run away with my sister. And she wouldn't go. And I thought- that's it. It's just never- it's just never." He shrugs.

He wets his lips again, and looks up at Tim. "I do, though. You know?"

* * *

He hates to see the poor fucker struggle so. "Maybe you could tap it out in Morse code, and the universe will cock its ear, and wonder, what the fuck is that, then, and go about its business."

That gets a smile, and he's hopping to see it, even if is buried underneath all those smug layers of beard.

"I read this book once-"

"Is this the one about the couple that has Morse code sex?"

"You always butt in on my best stories."

"Because you're terrible at them. Once it took you five times to get a punch line right, darling."

"So anyway, this lad and this lass were having the Morse code sex-"

"And he sent up a great big volcano gush of vanilla-flavored sperm."

"Vanilla and _musk_ , pardon you. It was a beautiful symbol of their love. And it was a Mt. Vesuvius eruption of sperm- no, no, wait- that was a different one."

"You see what I mean?"

"Ah, fuck off. As I said, they were having the Morse code sex, and through that they could express how they truly felt, even though his brothers kept butting in and trying to keep them apart. They were brother and sister, and the others didn't approve. Well, they weren't _really_ brother and sister, the lass just grew up across the street, and the other brothers thought of her as a sister. Or, wait, I think her parents died, and they took her in- yeah, and so the older brothers, they thought of her like a sister, growing up alongside her like that, except the one, he had the trots for her-"

Kol bursts out laughing. "This is a mess, darling. And you do know 'the trots' means he had diarrhea?"

"It does? I thought it was Yank slang for being hot under the bonnet."

"It's 'He has the _hots_ for her'."

He stretches back along the bench, letting his leg dangle over the side. "Anyway, it could still work. Maybe she makes him really nervous."

"Or he has Irritable Bowel Syndrome." Kol puts his feet up on the pew in front of him, and settles both hands in his pockets. "Do you know, I once made a man eat himself, and sometimes the things you read still concern me."

He drops his arm from the pew he's slung it over, and raps lightly on the back, two short knocks, then one, then a rattling staccato of five.

"And what does that mean?" Kol asks.

"I don't know, actually. I don't know Morse code."

"This was just poorly conceived all around, wasn't it, darling?"

He slings his arm back over the pew, and smiles from beneath his hat.

And then for a while they just sit in that fine repose of silence which no architecture of man lays quite so gently on the brow as these shrines of belief.

It's a fine thing for the years to steal a man's heart if they can't have his breath.

* * *

And so it goes.

They break into the Jameson Distillery one night and drink most of it, then go skinny dipping in the Liffey.

They're cheered on by a pissed stag party, whose groom has to be restrained from joining in, and is subsequently chased down O'Connell Street waving his shirt over his head, trousers half undone, the boot tongues flapping with each step.

Dublin is rocked by the slaying of two young women who appear to be the victims of a serial murderer.

He appears at the second crime scene dressed as a Garda, and goes round with the same air of solemnity which the other officers have muffled themselves in, that they might keep at least one fragile layer between themselves and this gruesome testimony to how fine an edge man walks, in this brain which is so indiscriminately faulty.

He squats down at the feet of the girl, and tilts his head, twirling the pencil which ostensibly is to be for his notes.

The stomach has been slit open, and the organs sloppily removed, the entrails still in a slippery heap across her lap, and you know, yawn, darling, he was hoping for a bit more creativity, this is a bit, oh, 101, don't you think?

He does have his quiet moments, though.

He likes to shave in one of the looking-glasses he stole from Bekah, propping it on the desk where Tim has scattered several of his books, and left a pair of his trousers hanging haphazardly off one corner, and chat while he maneuvers the clippers over the more unkempt patches of his beard.

Tim reads whatever it is he has currently propped on his bare stomach, here and there lying it down to offer a comment, or throw what's heaviest and closest at hand with a good-natured curse when he makes a jab.

He starts leaving Enzo a little more to his women, and stalking Tim on his nighttime walks, which with Dublin acquaint him as intimately as any man could ever hope to know a city.

They walk out to Howth one night, and sit for a while on the rocks skipping stones across the water, till Tim proposes a race out to Ireland's Eye at human speed, none of his old man cheating, now, so for a moment there is a staredown which the little flinches round the eyes and the twitches of the mouths reveal is a valiant attempt on both their parts not to laugh, and then a sudden burst of mad scrambling for the laces of the boots, and the collars of their shirts.

Tim has his shoes off first, but his shirt must be unbuttoned at least halfway before he can pull it off over his head, and so is left still undressing on the rocks when the midnight waters are first broken.

He takes a good slap of foam to his mouth, plunges under for a moment, resurfaces coughing.

Tim dives off the rocks, and the wake lifts him on one of its peaks, so that he is thrown out of his rhythm, and must flail for a moment to regain it, and he is recalled, suddenly, as only water cold enough to shrivel the testicles can shock a man back to his youth, that in his piddling human years he was rather rubbish at swimming. Competent but graceless, and only slightly slower than one of the village elders who was buried some ten years back, as Bekah graciously put it.

He grabs Tim round the neck and holds him under until his feet have kicked out all their most fervent struggles, and flutter merely out of habit.

He is soundly informed of what a cheating bastard he is, but well, darling, can he help it if you can't hold your breath long enough to survive a playful dunking?

Apparently, this isn't the the answer Tim was looking for.

"You're a touchy loser, darling," he points out helpfully, and is thrown off the very top of the church ruins which oversee the island.

* * *

Wednesday the Gate Theatre is showing _Romeo and Juliet_ , which is his least favorite of Shakespeare's comedies, but he does love a live show, and anyway, when's the last time he had an excuse to shame the handsomest of humanity's slenderest offerings which on its best of days barely holds a candle to his mere jeans and t-shirts? (To this day Elijah tells him _Romeo and Juliet_ is not, in fact, a comedy, but he cried till he nearly choked when that histrionic twit axed himself just seconds before his unconscious wife came to, so who exactly fails to grasp the true implications of the material, brother?)

He leans Bekah's looking-glass against one of Tim's books, and shaves himself clean.

Then the black dress trousers, neatly pleated on either leg, and into its waistband the crisp white shirt, whose cuffs may not be perfectly symmetrical, Elijah, but who needs symmetry when you've got a face like this, and lastly the black bow tie, which Bekah would have fussed over for a good century, while Nik watched with the grim anticipation of one who is next.

Tim has disappeared, probably to have his hat cleaned, and the comfortably lived-in boots shined back to their birth.

Enzo appears twenty minutes or so before the show, dressed in a tux he wears as comfortably as his jeans, and from his pockets taking three flasks. "The silver one's vodka," he says, and shuts the door behind him with his heel. "Where's Tim?"

"He'll be here soon, I'm sure. He's probably off having some of his buttons sewn back on. Or even buying a new shirt. The sky's the limit, as long as he doesn't have to take off his hat."

"He's going to Shakespeare dressed like that?"

"Tim's idea of dressing up is rolling down his shirt sleeves." He checks his watch, also pinched from Nik, who has enough of them anyway, and won't miss it. Probably. Perhaps. Anyway, Bekah's likely angry at him for one thing or another, and will take the blame for it. "Let's just start for the theatre now; I'll text him to meet us there."

They have just joined Dublin's throng, and have for their extreme and potentially illegal levels of handsomeness gotten more than a few stares, when he spots a man leaning against the statue of the angelic Courage, and has for a moment to stop, phone in his hand.

Enzo whistles.

"You were going to walk right past me," Tim says, smiling at him.

He's left off the hat, and has slicked back his hair so you can see the cut of his cheekbones, and over the broad shoulders there is snugged a fitted suit jacket, with the soft compliment of the dove gray vest underneath, the chain of his watch glittering star-like against this neutral background.

There is in his chest what he thinks a first love must feel like; he doesn't remember.

His palms agree with that dampness of the fidgety virgin, and he shoves them into his pockets.

If we are thrust so high on it, sooner or later it must toss us like a horse, and crush us beneath it, he thinks, but what heart is receptive to reason?

He doesn't disagree with your little spiel, Nik.

He tried so hard to remember it.

But anyway, deep breath, he loves (try to contain yourself, darling, the pounding heart is so very chaste, and the slick palms a touch post-Caroline Nik) this beardless young twit, and perhaps slowly, slowly, he will steady himself in this realization, and begin to feel one day it doesn't always have to be a fall, it doesn't have to be an ending, he doesn't have to hold his breath through it, till all the most painful parts are over.

He smiles, and he can tell by the way Enzo looks away that it's a private thing, that peculiar tunnel vision of lover and loved where all the world is merely a simulacrum, and such smiles sole truth, where the eyes for a moment meet and touch something deeper.

"I didn't recognize you, dressed in something that hasn't been foraged from an old man's rubbish bin."

Tim crosses his arms. "And I didn't recognize you, without the rat's nest."

He lifts his hands to either side, lets them drop against his legs. "As becoming as I am wearing absolutely anything, there's only so long you can deprive the world of the full pleasure of this." He strokes his smooth face.

"Ah, Jaysus." Tim shakes his head. "I'll be needing me boots back."

"Well, boys?" Enzo asks. "Shall we?"

They naturally fall into a certain order, as they manhandle their way through the evening crowd, he and Enzo out in front, Tim falling slightly behind, but he makes sure to yank Tim abreast, and loop one arm round his neck while they walk, the tourists parting willingly enough, and shivering a little at the neck, when he gives them that certain look.

The Irish wind makes a peak of Enzo's hair, and he gets a good surge of bang right in his own eye; Tim's hair is too stiff to so much as tentatively flutter.

"What have you got in there, darling, cement?" He reaches out to stroke it the wrong way, giving him a sticky-looking Mohawk.

"Keep your paws to yourself! I'll have you know, I spent a good half hour on this," Tim protests, smoothing it back.

"We won't even need any lube tonight; I'll just rub my cock on your head for a moment."

An old man stops and stares at him.

He tosses his other arm round Enzo. "I believe we need a theme song for this strut, darlings. What about the one about the dragon? The one where the singer's too hot for a dragon or something?"

"He's so hot he makes the dragon want to retire," Tim corrects him.

"How hot would you have to be anyway, to make a dragon want to retire?" Enzo asks.

"Observe," he says, and gestures at himself.

* * *

He loves the tension of the curtain.

There is a certain awe of that heavy drape, the laughter is hushed, the conversations are conducted behind hands, the children shushed, the hearts rise into this communal throat of spectatorship.

Anxiety is communicable; maturity reversed, childhood revisited, the wonder of novelty heavy in your stomach, and gleaming in your eyes.

Perhaps the story you've heard before, in dry and ancient prose, which lies untasted on the page.

He has seen _Romeo and Juliet_ , to be exact, 1,024 ½ times.

But each Romeo is new, and every Mercutio more homosexually repressed than the last, Juliet sometimes wears the traditional gown, or modern blouse, she sometimes misses the emphasis that is required of her 'nor any other part belonging to a man' speech, there is in Romeo a naïveté, an arrogance, futility, virility, he does not always understand precisely what torch it is she teaches to burn bright, Nurse is by turns melodramatic, monochromatic, the scene dressing, the show-stopper.

He leans forward with his chin in his hands.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Tim smile at him for a long while before turning to face the curtain.

He keeps his hearing at a human decibel, so that he doesn't hear the prep of the chorus, the last recitations of the actors, the shuffling of the costumes, so the dimming lights shock him just a bit, his heart lifts, he strains forward as far as the next row allows him.

The curtains part.

He sees both Enzo and Tim sneak a sip from their flasks, but he is rapt upon the chorus, and cannot reach for his own.

"Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,

Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;

The which if you patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend."

Just smashing beginning, darlings.

He does hope you keep it up. It's a nice theatre; he'd hate to get blood all over it.

* * *

Kol watches the play like a child.

He likes to see that sort of smile, pressed back into the knuckles cradling his cheeks on either side.

It reminds him you could be, oh, a billion and seventy-five, and still resurrect beauty from all the old world.

Fecking sap, he thinks fondly, and his hand itches for a tousle of the wind-stirred bangs, but he won't rouse the lad, not from a spell like that.

Anyway, not till he sees the eyes start following Juliet's tits far closer than her lines, and clocks Kol a good one in the ribs with his elbow.

Don't you be givin' him the 'but look I'm so handsome' smile, you fuck.

* * *

Tim reaches over during the second act, while Benvolio and Mercutio stand scratching their heads over Romeo's cold bed, and grabs his hand.

He's slipped his own hand under the arm rest, so he means it sneakily, and is probably red with it, and for a moment he stifles his amusement at this, covering it with a cough, and then leans back in his seat so Tim's wrist isn't so awkwardly cocked.

Romeo settles his marriage plans with Juliet's nurse, the curtain is lowered, there is the brief scraping of a hasty set change, and then those breasts appear once more in all their abundant glory.

Tim punches him in the shoulder.

The actress is unruffled.

Enzo has taken one too many dips into his flask, though, and bursts out laughing.

"You show some respect!" some old lady hisses from behind them, and appears angry enough to box the ears off the lot of them.

Tim is properly shamed, and slides down in his seat with his free hand over his eyes; Enzo pats him on the shoulder. "It's all right, mate, he deserved that."

"O God, she comes! O honey Nurse, what news?" Juliet asks smoothly, and furrows that lovely brow, taking the gasping old woman by her shoulders. "Hast thou met with him? Send thy man away."

Tim's cheeks are downright sunburnt; he fans him helpfully with his program.

* * *

This performance has been quite stable, he thinks; the actors have got a good grasp of where all the little inflections must be placed, and how to move not with that artificial pomp of some amateurs, who appear to associate Shakespeare's florid prose with bowel issues, but naturally, smoothly, so for that at least they won't be eaten.

And he greatly enjoyed Juliet's dramatic downing of that fateful potion; he stood and clapped until the old lady threatened him, and Tim pulled him down by the sleeve.

Coincidentally, she will not be making it out alive.

Romeo and Paris engage their swords; he leans forward in eager anticipation as they dodge among the headstones, throwing their lines at one another so they are almost not a reading, but rather a natural release of everything that festers inside a man, he hears pain, not performance, and mouths the words in silent support: Stop thy unhallowed toil, vile Montague! Can vengeance be pursued further than death? Condemned villain, I do apprehend thee: Obey, and go with me; for thou must die.

The swords sing; Tim shifts beside him; upstage, Juliet lies motionless on her slab.

For a moment, he squints at the spread of her hair, and the angle of her jaw, tipped up so the face is unrecognizable to him.

He flicks his eyes back to the struggling men.

He's not sure he completely approves of the fight's placement, but it's well-staged enough.

"I must indeed, and therefore came I hither."

He looks once more to Juliet, cocking his head.

The hips lie gracefully beneath the skirt, scarcely disturbing its line, and the hands folded upon her breast are muffled by the elaborately inaccurate bosom of the dress, the one half of her lies in that outer edge of Paris and Romeo's spotlight, the other in darkness-

"I do defy thy conjurations and apprehend thee for a felon here."

They have paused to catch their breaths, and warily circle one another now.

Tim leans forward, setting his chin on top of his balled fists.

Enzo has abandoned his flask, and tips himself toward the stage with similar rapture.

There is a twitch inside him, he is drawn back to the peaceful Juliet, with the light like a fickle moon on her jaw line, the white hands perfectly still-

"O, I am slain!" Paris cries out, and falls with one hand to his chest. "If thou be merciful, open the tomb, lay me with Juliet."

"In faith, I will. Let me peruse this face: Mercutio's kinsman, noble County Paris!" Romeo sinks to his knees, to cradle the dying Paris.

He is distracted by the soft reflection of the lights off Tim's hair, the pulses all around him in breathless sprint, the trembling of Paris' hand, Romeo's sweat-

The chair beneath him is suddenly intolerable, his suit too hot, Tim's breathing too loud-

"How oft when men are at the point of death have they been merry! which their keepers call a lightning before death: O, how may I call this a lightning? O my love! My wife!"

He squints at Juliet again, feels in himself the brink before the sudden flailing step into realization, grabs Tim by the thigh, he doesn't know why, but it's hard enough to jolt him in his seat, and take his attention from the stage-

Romeo mounts the stone platform of Juliet's slab.

"Death, that hath suck'd the honey of thy breath, hath had no power yet upon thy beauty: thou art not conquer'd; beauty's ensign yet is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks, and death's pale flag is not advanced there." He touches her cheek reverently.

"Are you all right?" Tim whispers very quietly, keeping an eye out for that old woman behind them.

Romeo has begun to sob on Juliet's breast. "Ah, dear Juliet, why art thou yet so fair? Shall I believe that unsubstantial death is amorous, and that the lean abhorred monster keeps thee here in dark to be his paramour?" He shakily opens the phial he takes from his tunic. "For fear of that, I will stay with thee, and never from this palace of dim night depart again: here, here I will remain with worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here will I set up my everlasting rest, and shake the yoke of inauspicious stars from this world-wearied flesh."

The lashes on those pale cheeks stir not an inch, the hands on the sleeping bosom rise nary a centimeter.

"Kol," Tim whispers, and brushes a thumb along his jaw. "You all right, lad?"

"Come, bitter conduct, come, unsavory guide!"

The nervous hands slosh just a bit of the phial's poison.

Tim stops trying to engage him and settles for leaving a hand on his knee.

"Thou desperate pilot, now at once run on the dashing rocks thy sea-sick weary bark. Here's to my love!"

Romeo lifts the phial.

For a moment, the haunted eyes are turned out over the audience, who with a gasp notices what this stricken lover will not see in time: the first shudder of the lash, and flicker of the hand.

He drinks.

"O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick."

And now the fair lids peel open, the hands release, and fall open at her sides, Juliet begins her slow rebirth, the shining hair whispering quietly against the slab, and the dress making a quiet river of its ruffles over the stone-

Romeo touches her face so softly, his tenderness resonates so far out into the audience, who each perch silently in their own individual suffering-

Their lips brush.

Romeo hangs in her grip for a moment, feeling with such wide-eyed awe the living mouth, and the warm cheeks, bravo, darling, you can see, to the very tips of him, how he quivers with his discovery.

Juliet slips his dagger from its sheathe.

"Thus with a kiss I die," Romeo breathes against her mouth.

He can see, out of the corner of his eye, how pale Tim has gone.

Juliet fingers the dagger for a moment, turns it so the light catches it just so, the audience leans as one, Tim's hand has gone rigid on his knee, Juliet lifts her eyes beseechingly, and raises the dagger after.

She stabs Romeo in the throat with it.

"Hello, Kol," his sister says cheerfully.

* * *

He leaves Kol and the sister arguing in their hotel room, and steps out for a walk.

Must be just after ten or so; back at the theatre there was the crush of the audience making for the exit doors, everyone screaming, few of the more lucid ones panicking through their emergency calls, oh, a right mess, but here on Grafton he's not much but the cobblestones for company, and here and there the errant junkie watching from their sleeping bags.

He can smell Stephen's Green from here.

Used to be, round about 98 years ago, you couldn't make out the flowers from the powder, and the sweet grass crushed beneath sweating youth, who were for the first time putting their shoulders to the might of the British like all their Das before them.

His hands are still shaking just slightly.

He pockets them both.

There was a moment, when he first recognized Kol's sister- he thought sure Klaus'll be lurking then, he'd feel the hands on his neck, not menacing at first, almost tender, like, you'd want to lean into them, you'd hear the murmur in your ear, shh, shh, it's all right, mate, and you'd know to your tiptoes oh, thank me Father in heaven and any others might have had a hand in it-

You're safe now, lad.

Anyway, that was what he thought, strung up in the ruins of that old fort, bleeding from anything squishy.

He'd feel the kind hand on his cheek, and for a moment love him just a little, as he would have loved anything which reached him through that fog, and gentled him beyond the sting of his nail growing back, and the crunch of the knee cap piecing together its slivers.

And then there'd be the same touch on his hand, and the crack of the wrist breaking, and all the world before him whiting out, and some poor fucker screaming for a solid few seconds before he recognized the bastard.

Just the sister; just the sister, it's all right, then, breathe, you silly fuck, he tells himself, and wipes the sweat from his upper lip.

He sits down on the step in front of the shopping center just outside Stephen's Green, and for a moment breathes with his head between his knees, oh, he'd knock over your granny right now, and strangle the old bint black for the pack of cigarettes he left back at the hotel.

The flowers are fresh-blooming in their beds, and the stones still raw with an earlier rain, so he can smell the earth and the years in them, the moon hunts the mystery from the street, and lamps him a good one with the whop of the reality: just the empty shops, and the moon-like glimmer of his own arsehole face in the windows.

He blows out his final steadying breath, and pops his collar.

It always works for those movie lads.

Right. He's not scared, then, he's 123, he'll walk with a swagger, he'll touch his slick hair, and do the Michael Jackson thing with the feet-

Right, not that. Look like an asshole. Lord let the surveillance cameras have been put to bed like sweet babies.

He snaps the lock on the bars with his hand and lets himself into Stephen's Green; he's not risking these trousers on the top of that gate.

Nice place for a night stroll, once you've fought off the bums, and had a snack from the Garda patrolling the grounds. Can hardly tell you're packed into a city two million thick; the trees snap right closed round you, the little stream chuckles away under your feet, if there is in all of Dublin technology roaring past on the streets, or blinking away in the coffee shops, fuck if you know, watching the flowers drowse by moonlight, and the statues sleep till morn.

He stops on the little wooden bridge to drape his arms over the railing.

He flips down his collar. Jaysus, he's an asshole sometimes.

There's the faint burning on the back of his neck, where you feel the eyes most prickly of all.

Two yellow fecking eyes, he sees when he turns back toward the entrance, and the rest of the creature blending into the shadows the trees have laid over its coat.

And Jesus, _Jesus_ , it's on his goddamned throat in a second, he braces himself a bare moment before the hit, and then they're bang on the railing, the bloody thing cracks loudly, he loses his footing, fuck fuck _fuck_ get it off him, _get it off him_ -

He bashes the snapping jaws against the railing, once, twice, gets a hand round the throat as the wolf pushes, pushes, the railing groaning beneath him, the splinters ruining his poor jacket, there's another crack, something splashes into the water-

Jaysus, fur in the nose, fur in the eyes, he can't see what he's jammed his thumb into, but it yields, the wolf yelps, it skips back, he kicks the fucker's snout-

And now round the throat, he can feel the ridges of the windpipe, and the sudden whistling struggle of the inhales, one of his fingers snaps, the thumb creaks, but the teeth are flinging saliva all over him, he's slimed to the elbow, the cuff of his sleeve hangs in ribbons, but oh Jesus, Jesus, thank you Father, the skin's not broken-

He gives the head another smack against the railing, feels the skull crack, the railing sag, draws the head back once more, smashes it through the wood, so he feels the reverberation in his own teeth, and flips the whole limp thing over the railing and into the stream.

Jesus- _Jesus_ -

"The _fuck_?" he snaps, and the second one jumps him from the side.

* * *

"I recognized your thick ankles," he tells Bekah, smiling up at her from where he has decided to recline on the bed, hands behind his head, while she bickers with him.

Enzo is watching them from the chair in the corner, moving his eyes with great interest from one to the other, like he's watching one of those matches with the balls and paddles. Peen dong? Something like that. It's rather kinky. Though he has been informed by reliable sources he doesn't play it correctly.

Ping pong. He thinks that's it.

There is the smell of blood in the hall.

Tim must have had himself a nice walk.

"Well, Bekah, I don't know what to tell you. They look fat to me."

Bekah grabs him by the feet and flips him right off the bed; he lands in a crouch, and straightens his bow tie with a little smirk when he stands.

The door bursts open.

"If you're going to consort with peasants, Kol, at least teach them some manners," Bekah says tartly.

"It's his room, darling," he replies, and then he gets his first look at Tim, who has returned with a ripped sleeve, a torn collar, blood all down the side of his neck- he's quite the wreck. "What the hell happened to you?"

"I've got a slight problem."

* * *

 **A/N: lol sorry they were too happy bye oops**


	2. Part Two

**A/N: So some of you know I have been struggling a bit lately with my posting motivation/self-confidence, which is why this update is a bit later than everyone expected. I actually finished writing this a good two weeks ago or so, and have just been kind of sitting on it, unmotivated to get moving on final edits. But anyway, it's here now, and thanks to those of you who helped talk me through my insecurities. I think every writer struggles with them at some point and can feel crippled by them.**

 **Congratulations to clonemaster-general on her graduation. Here's an engineering joke I stole off the internet just for you: Three engineering students were gathered together discussing who must have designed the human body. One said, "It was a mechanical engineer. Just look at all the joints." Another said, "No, it was an electrical engineer. The nervous system has many thousands of electrical connections." The last one said, "No, actually it had to have been a civil engineer. Who else would run a toxic waste pipeline through a recreational area?"**

 **The book Klaus and Caroline are reading from is Michael Crudden's translation of the Homeric Hymns, specifically Hmn 8: To Ares.**

 **And with that said, welcome to the next part. Thank you for sticking with me through this beast of a series. The end is, if you can believe it, nigh.**

* * *

 **2014, New Orleans**

"No; that's wrong."

She pivots around slowly to face Klaus. "What? No, it's not."

"Yes it is, love."

"No, because when it's an irregular verb, you have to-"

"It's not the right conjugation, Caroline." He looks way too amused by this, sprawled in his chair like he's the freaking lord of _everything_ , and anyway, _fine_ , oh Master of All, she supposes you know better-

Ok, he knows better, he's three million and twelve, but he doesn't have to look _smug_ about it, he doesn't have to just be so freaking _pleased_ that she faltered on one teensy little conjugation, and you know _what_ , she thinks this is a damn fine translation, otherwise.

She crosses her arms, making sure to squish her boobs together. "Are you absolutely, positively sure? You've been kind of distracted today."

"Positive, sweetheart," he assures her, and if his attention has been somewhat fickle this afternoon, for a moment at least she can tell he sees only her, and she tries to remember, you don't have to stop breathing every time he flashes those dimples.

She clears her throat, and opens her book once more. " Shield-holding…rescuer? Rescuer of…cities, wore…protective…something…his big hand is really not tired…as he holds a big spear-"

She can tell he is trying not to laugh. " _What_?"

"Nothing," he says innocently, folding his hands on his knee.

She clears her throat again, more dramatically this time. "Olympos'…wall, father of winning, good at the fighting-"

He bursts out laughing.

She huffs and lowers the book. "Seriously, _what_?"

"No, nothing- please, go on, Caroline," he says with some difficulty, and presses his lips together.

His shoulders he doesn't have quite as much control over, and she can still see them trembling in the aftershocks of his outburst.

"You bring…help for…Themis, you bully of mean persons- Klaus, stop _laughing_!"

"Do you want some help?" he asks, throwing a leg over the arm of his chair, and slouching with his fingers steepled in front of his mouth, which she can see is still twitching.

" _No_. You head of people who like justice a lot…you have a…staff…king of brave who throws a fire ball among the signs of heaven that…walk down seven roads where horses on fire keep you…from? Third something of the air."

He's laughing again.

She shuts the book with a loud smack.

"I'm sorry- I'm sorry, Caroline," he gasps, and she hopes all his minions can hear him.

He giggles like a little girl.

"Here," he tells her, and holds out his hand for the book.

She throws herself into his chair when he stands, and sets a hand on either arm rest, tapping her fingers briskly, and arching an eyebrow.

He clears his throat theatrically, with exactly the same number of 'ah-hems' as she coughed out, and she looks casually at her nails so he understands that she is _so_ not impressed right now, buddy.

She can freaking _feel_ him smiling at her.

"Shield-bearing saviour of cities, clothed in armour of bronze, whose mighty hand unwearied wields a spear that is strong, Olympos' bulwark, father of Victory skilful in war, you who bring help to Themis, you who are tyrant to foes, you who are leader of humans who cherish justice most, sceptred king of valour who whirl a fire-bright orb amongst the portents of heaven that wander along seven paths, where blazing colts keep you for ever beyond the third rim of the sky!"

"Well, of course you can translate it better. You probably wrote it," she says crisply.

"I'm not quite that old, love. Anyway, I wouldn't be too terribly hard on yourself. The Homeric Hymns in the original Greek are a bit over the head of any beginning language student."

"Not _this_ one." She snatches the book out of his hand, and pushes him down into the chair.

He looks amused.

"Ok, so, how do I get it to flow better? Because most of my translations weren't technically wrong. They just sounded really awkward."

"You have to be somewhat of a poet yourself. To understand, you can't merely exchange the English word for the Greek, you must first understand the format of the original, the sounds, the texture, how to preserve that feel in the translation, and how to bring it all together in a rhythm which the English speaker will understand."

"Ok, but you're not a poet."

He smiles modestly, or as near an approximation as he can manage. "Actually, I've dabbled quite a bit in poetry over the centuries, Caroline."

"Ok, but that's not what I would call the atrocities in that little journal you keep on the classical literature shelf."

"Did Elijah show you that?" he snaps.

"No; I dug it up myself the other day."

He leans back in his chair, still looking mildly pissed. "You're young. You don't yet grasp the intricacies of the classical formats."

"'And when yonder love serpent imparts his milk, and the petals have closed their paradiseal gates' has never been a poetic 'format', Klaus. 'Paradiseal' isn't even a word."

"You can make up your own!" he barks, and his irritation dissolves hers.

"Oooh, someone's touchy."

He gives her a look that she knows is not a threat, knows is not a promise, it's just: he was looking, and then he couldn't stop.

He's distracted today; his curls are a little more disheveled, not artfully, agitatedly, he's put his hands through them more than a few times, he has opened his mouth approximately 312 times to tell her whatever it is he doesn't have the nuts to say.

She might have pushed, three years ago, oh so many deaths ago, when she had a mother.

But you can see, you can just look at someone and _know_ : somewhere there's a good-bye, somewhere there's a see you maybe never, because first she made this deal: she was always going to die, and then she made this other deal: she was always going to live, and seventeen and pink-cheeked, you can reconcile neither, but what you do know- what you do know is you never keep anything, not forever.

And that's what she sees, when she looks at him.

"Try the next few lines," he tells her, and with his hands behind his back goes to stand before the window, and look out at the sun.

She bends the book back at the spine.

"Give attention, you friend of people, giver of…well young."

And then just like that, he's laughing at her again.

She throws the book at him. "Ugh! You are such a jerk."

She wishes this could be what it's always made of, just some giddy dork laughing in the sun, because she cocked her head, she tossed her hair, maybe she didn't do anything at all, she just walked into a room, and it was brighter, he remembered two, three hundred years in, oh, yeah, the curl of the hair next to the ear, the angle of her jaw, the first note of her laugh, it's why he fell, it's why he stayed- it's not even the important things, you can absently brush a stray curl, a random piece of stubble, and remember, oh God, you love them so much.

He does the hands behind the back goober smile, and ducks his head a little, because one thousand years old, you can still find new things inside you, God, Mom, that's what she tries so hard to remember, you can be that, you can be _that_ , and still look at someone like this.

She flings the book at him.

He catches it easily, of course.

"Ok, so, Dean will be by at 5:00-"

"Who the hell is Dean?" he demands, frowning now as he smoothes the binding she has mangled just a teensy tiny bit, if she's being honest, but anyway, it's his fault for being so _annoying_ , she had to clutch something, his throat was too far away, and anyway, it's Elijah's, so Klaus will take the blame for it anyway.

Yadda yadda, this is what comes of bringing peasants in the house, something like that.

Whatever.

She flicks hair off her shoulder. "He's one of my students."

Klaus rolls his eyes, and with a sigh leans back against the windowsill, maybe by coincidence, probably by design, because there's no way he can't know what it is the light does for that Henley, and those shoulders-

"Love, I told you the other day I can't have you parading a bunch of stray puppies through here. What do you think that would do for my reputation? I'm not running an orphanage."

" _You're_ not running anything."

"Neither are you, if I say so. It's my house."

She laughs and folds her hands beneath her chin, batting her lashes. "Aw. You are adorable."

He looks like he's not sure whether to eat her or kiss her, and she kind of likes that, she likes the little glint in his eyes, and that particular cant of his head, the ponderous one, you don't know, is he jovial or murderous, has he taken offense, or to himself patted your sweet young head, and laughed at this folly of youth, always thinking it's so unstoppable, it's so revolutionary, but she's Caroline Forbes.

She's both.

She faces him squarely, feet shoulder-width apart, hands on her hips, and she can see him from here, thinking about what her throat tastes like.

"It's not an orphanage. I'm just helping them get their feet under them. Transitioning by yourself is scary, I had to do it, and I don't want anyone else to have to. Also!" She claps her hands. "I found this old school chalkboard and everything, and I'm having some movers bring in several desks in about an hour. I already have my lesson plan made up. I was thinking you could-"

"No."

"-demonstrate what not to do," she finishes, unruffled. "Like you could be my teacher's assistant."

"I'm never the assistant, Caroline."

"Ok, well, you're definitely not going to be the teacher. _I_ get to do that. You can sit at one of the desks and pretend to be one of my students, and we can, I don't know, role play afterward, if that helps. Anyway, I just wanted you to know he'll be here in a few hours. _Don't_ eat him, Klaus, or I swear to _God_." She doesn't need to finish that. It's better to leave them hanging, anyway.

His imagination is so much better than her own.

He brings the book around in front of him, curling both his hands over it, and looking at her so innocently she immediately narrows her eyes at him. "I suppose I should let you know then that Adelaide will be over in a bit, just to go over a few of her assignments."

She makes her voice as flat as she can get it. "What?"

God, she could just punch him right in his _stupid_ dimples. "Well, you'll be busy with your teaching anyway, love. She and I have a few things to discuss; I'm sure you understand."

" _No_ , I don't, and you know I don't. Why don't you just get rid of her? She's a little boyfriend-stealing skank."

"You can't steal what doesn't want to be taken, Caroline," he tells her, deepening the dimples, and looking up at her from beneath his eyebrows, so there's that creepy puppy-like artlessness that so totally might work on her, if she didn't know he's Ted Bundy the Calvin Klein model.

"Ok, fine. She's a _wannabe_ little boyfriend-stealing skank. I'm sure you can get another minion somewhere. That doesn't want to put their grabby little paws all over you."

"I think that would be rather difficult to find," he replies modestly.

She rolls her eyes.

His smile has changed, so it's less puppy, more Satan. "You could always eat her."

"I am not killing her just because you're a weirdo who wants me to, like, throw Jell-o on her and then strangle her with my muddy bikini top."

She does make sure the bitch will be sure to smell her all over him, though.

The window cracks when she slams him by the throat against it, and kisses him until he drops his book.

* * *

 **2014, Dublin**

"You got bit. _How could you get bit_?" Kol yells.

"I don't know!" he yells back, pulling the shirt away from his neck, and trying to coax the fucking heart back down out of his throat, and oh, Jesus, his stomach's fecked, he needs a good vomit-

"You don't know how you got bit- you were there for it, I assume?"

"No, I've been here the whole time- didn't you notice me?"

Well, he doesn't find that very funny, then. Looks like he might knock the mug off him, and smush it about beneath his nice dress heel.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Enzo's stood, and has started to casually inch his way between them, looking a little rattled- ah, thanks, lad, he does appreciate that.

The poison's simmering in him already, shyly poking away at his innards, it'll want a nibble or two, then, to test the constitution of him, before it commences with the full meal, and he tries, oh Jaysus he does, to breathe a little more slowly, to not let the surge of his heart be the product of his demise, sure it'll be hurrying the death along, then, right through his veins where he can feel already the beginning scorch, but oh, he's so fucking _scared_ , lad-

"The cure's all the way back in New Orleans, Tim. In _my brother_."

" _I know_!" he snaps, in the kind of voice you never mean to double up against a loved one, and use as a lash, but it just spills out of him like that- don't you talk to him like he doesn't- like he doesn't _know_ -

"I'm fucked," he says more softly.

"No," Kol tells him, roughly, and he remembers, death isn't so kind as to matter most of all to the one who has to bear it least of all. "You're not."

"I beat his head in with a 2x4 and ran away with his brother. He's not going to offer me a fresh vein out of the goodness of his heart. He didn't kill me. That was his mercy. You only get one with Klaus, if you're lucky."

"Then maybe avoiding a row with a werewolf might have been the wisest course!" Kol blasts out, as the thumb and forefinger come down from the bridge of his nose, and Enzo eases his way a little further between them now that the blood's freshened both cheeks again, and Kol has stepped forward looking for something to clout.

"Oh, sure, I'll remember next time to politely ask him, "Ah, yeh, Mr. Wolf? Do you mind not gnawing me neck, then? I'll be needin' it, if that's all right with you."

You never want to snap a bastarding neck so much as the one belongs to your best lad.

For a moment, he feels the tension just building and building, and round his collar that maddening itch of drying blood, Enzo stirs, fully between them now like they might make a spring for one another's necks, but from Kol not a twitch, he just stares, breathing like it's him that's wounded, the sister watching from her chair.

"I'm calling Caroline," he says at last. "If anyone can get some of Nik's blood, it's her. If she leaves right now-"

"She's probably at least a twelve hour flight with layovers. If she leaves right this second. If there's a flight right now, if she can talk him into just handing over a vial, or stabbing him, or whatever fucked scenario is going through your head right now, and she can get to the airport immediately."

Kol takes his phone out of his pocket, defiantly, his jaw tight. "Then I'll go myself, if she can't get it. I can take Nik."

"Right, and then we'll both be dead. Don't you bother with him. He's never been _fucked_ about anything you want."

Enzo's brushed unceremoniously aside, and then he's got Kol right in his face, their noses nearly touching, and, oh, right, puff your chest at him, what a fucking help it'll be, to measure pricks-

"Shut your mouth about Nik."

Don't you be telling him _shit_ about that fucker, don't you sit here and you sermonize to yourself, you stupid bastard- oh, he knows what you want, if the giant weeping _fuck_ would just _care_ , if he'd for once look at his own brother's happiness and judge it not by his own advantages, if he would just see, here's the boy I held fresh from the mother's womb, his joy is not a pawn, well I'll be fucked if it doesn't benefit me, I just want the little bastard bundled and snug in his ecstasy.

" _No_. What's he ever done but _shit_ on you? Oh, good for him- he found it within his benevolent heart to let you go have a life, after he stuck you in a fucking box for a century. Don't you think for a second he gives a _fuck_ about you, Kol. Not if he can't control you." He takes a breath, tastes it sticky in his throat, thinks oh, Jesus, Jesus, let him not bust out like some tiny lass, and blubber all down the shirt is fucked anyway.

He was so fucking excited, slipping himself carefully into it.

Oh, he'll just shit, he'd thought, smiling shyly at himself in the glass, and looking back at him there was this right and proper gentlemen whose collar might have itched a bit, and whose dress shoes chafed at the ankles, not like the boots sanded to custom perfection by the millions of steps and the tens of years, but he'd get the smile, oh, he'd get the _smile_ -

Fuck him, he's about to spout like a blown water main.

"He doesn't care if I die," he says, gruffly, so at least someone can say, perhaps he was a poofter, but he went out like a man, the pretty Kerry lad. "Especially not if it matters to you."

* * *

It's not Tim's fault he's right.

You don't hit a man because the truth is too large, you're too scared of it, you have within you all the years you can hold up as rebuttal, and all the many more you can't hold up at all.

"I'm calling Caroline," he says, turning away.

Tim brushes past him.

"Where are you going?" he asks with the phone halfway to his ear, and he doesn't mean to be angry, he's just tired of being the one left alive, he's tired of lying in his sister's arms because at least they're warm, at least she's there, at least she is similarly unassailable by the years, he's tired of thinking remember, remember, it's not a love story, it's not much of a story at all, there's only the beginning and the middle, and all the ceaseless happily-never-afters that happen when the ink will never dry on that final full stop. "Don't you think you've done enough stupid things for tonight?"

"Well, I'm not going to die shut up in here. And, anyway, I've already done the stupidest thing I can think of, getting involved with you and this damn family," Tim snaps, and then for a moment he freezes, and you can see the remorse in every angle of him.

But when a man most regrets his words, it's because he spoke a fact not ready to be swallowed. "I didn't mean that."

"Yes you did," he says, and walks out.

* * *

She has just cracked her lesson planner and given Dean her brightest smile when her phone rings.

She reaches without looking to silence it.

* * *

Tim is gone when he returns to their room, but he's easy enough to track: he has broken into one of the corner shops for a packet of cigarettes and chain-smoked his way down to Christchurch.

His wound has opened once more.

It has begun to rain.

First, in that steady deluge which seizes all days in fits and starts and is reluctantly shooed by the sun, who will have her flirt come hell or Liffey.

And then it snuffs the streetlights, it blots the pub which is only a scant three steps from him, the windows are rattled as in some cosmic cannon blast, his hair is just ruined, the suit soaked absolutely through, the shirt pastes itself with sluttish precision to his chest.

He has often bragged of his, shall we say, trouserly superiority, which no nose of good sense might turn itself up at, and no gendered hand wave aside regardless of public persecution.

But he's nothing impressive enough that his courage does not outweigh his cowardice.

The rain blunts his nose, blinds his eyes, stings from his hand all the sensations which time and dust have long since interred, but he does not approach the church.

He stands on the sidewalk, huddled beneath the streetlight, watching the lamp make inconstant stripes on his shoes which are then divided by the rain, to be fought over in the gutters, where the storm has chased it quivering to its end.

He watches the windows weep, the roofs bear this storm with those undaunted shrugs which sluice new rivers into the street, the curbs stop up, the pubs gather those pale spectators of wonder-dumbed tourists.

But he doesn't go into the church.

He paces down the street a ways, rings Caroline once more, hangs up on her voicemail, paces back to the corner, to the streetlight, to the church with its swampland of drowned lawn and overrunning window boxes.

If one sits, and listens with all of him, surely he might hear Ireland grow another inch, he might hear the grass creep, the moss lay down a damp frost, the trees creak another arboreal conquest.

So might he also hear his friend's breath begin to rattle in his throat, and the delicate tissue yield another inch to mortal necrosis, and remember oh yes, oh yes- here it comes again, Death, the sneaky bitch.

Just when you thought you'd got her beat.

He sits down on the sidewalk.

He's going to vomit, and these are such nice shoes.

He runs his hands over his hair and drops his head between his knees and away between the tips of them the rain swirls, against his shoulders it pounds, his fingers age in a moment before his very eyes, he takes a breath, draws in another, feels his stomach reluctantly settle.

The church door opens behind him, but he knew that, he heard the faint whisper of the hinges the second Tim touched the handle, and the sudden leap of his friend's heartbeat, there is the exhale of candle wax and dust that tells him in a moment he will hear a voice, or feel a hand upon his shoulder, and so he stands with his hands in his pockets (the best of all the casual stances, he's found over the years; a man's world cannot fall apart with his hands in his pockets), and turns to face Tim across the yard.

The jacket has been divested, and the shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows.

He has a cigarette in his mouth, and his own hands in both pockets.

"Christ, you idiot, get out of that," he calls over the yard, and holds open the door with one hand, smoking with the other.

* * *

"Ok, so when you start to get really hungry, you'll start to feel this sort of itching in your teeth, right? And that's when you know you need to get a snack soon, or it's curtains for the nearest tourist."

Dean makes a note.

Klaus slips into the room, and shuts the door quietly behind him.

"Um, you're kind of _late_ ," she snaps.

He smiles, and takes a seat at a desk just a few down from Dean, where he will be always within the peripheral vision of the twitchy newborn, and can spend the entire class making freaky with his creepy Mr. Burns finger-steepling routine. " _No_. Sit in the back."

He puts his feet up on his desk instead.

Dean glances nervously between them.

"Good to meet you, mate," Klaus says with just the perfect amount of charm in his voice. "Dean, right?"

"Uh, yes. Sir?"

"Don't talk to him," she demands as Klaus licks his lips and says, "Now that's what I like to hear."

He raises an innocent eyebrow at her. "Go on, love. I'll just sit here quietly and observe."

* * *

"Did you ring Caroline?" Tim asks when the door has been shut behind him, and he has reclaimed his seat on one of the pews, perching on its back and balancing his feet on the bench just behind it. He musses his hair and flicks his cigarette on the floor.

"Yes. She's not answering. I can't leave a voicemail, of course, because Nik might overhear her listening to it, so I'll try her again in a few more minutes. I'll give it an hour and then we'll catch a flight out-"

"No," Tim says firmly.

They stare at one another for a moment.

Tim lights another cigarette.

He takes a long inhale from it, blows a hot gray cloud into the space between them, scratches at the back of his neck. "I don't want to fight, Kol. Not now."

He tests the lump in his throat, decides he can swallow around it after all, looks down at his shoes until he is sure he is composed, sure he is in command of himself, his voice will not crack, his eyes not mist, life goes like this sometimes, that's all-

There once was a boy called Kol.

You might recognize this story.

You will try to say yours is different.

You will try to tell it a different way.

But life goes like this, darlings.

It's only a story, you could say, and breathe your good-bye sweetly against the trembling lips you will miss for a while, but oh, what are mortals here for, if not to lose and lose again.

"I'm not going back," Tim says quietly, and he just keeps on looking at his shoes. "I know what you want. You want to go to him and tell him someone you care about is dying. And you want him to not care what he thinks of me, you want him to not care he's not got a use or a reason for me, you want him to not do it because it's good or bad, or right or wrong, you want him to do it just because it's for you. You want that to be enough. There's nothing wrong with that, Kol. But it's not who your brother is. I'm sure he was once. I'm sure he deserved everything you're still holding onto. But don't keep bloodying yourself on him. Ring Caroline. But we're not going back to New Orleans. I'll just have to roll me dice like any other poor bastard. And if I'm going to die, I want to do it here."

There was a reason, after all, he didn't come in from that rain.

"So you want me to just let you die," he says finally, looking up. He's not sure how well he said it; not steadily, he knows from the look on Tim's face, not with that smooth oration of a man accustomed to giving any number of death speeches to all the soft-cheeked boys and girls who will never outlast his youth.

"I want you to respect us both more than that. I want you to respect yourself enough to not go running back to him. I want you to respect me enough to let me make me own choice." He flicks this cigarette too on the floor, and pockets his hands. "It's not for you to say, Kol," he says, but he does it gently enough, smiling a little to lessen the blow.

But there was a witch, Tim, and did it have to-

Did it have to be you both?

He licks his lips, feels the breath swell in his chest, his nostrils flare with it, there is the sudden hot pressure in his chest and his eyes, he looks up to find Tim staring at him rather pityingly, now, now, darling, don't do that-

"I don't need your permission to take you back to New Orleans."

Tim slides his feet on the pew back, so he's snugged his heels against it instead of balancing his toes on the edge. "I know that. You could break me neck, clout me over the head, whatever you like, and haul me wherever you want." He hunches his shoulders, burrows his hands a little deeper into his pockets, looks up absolutely unblinking. "But I didn't think it needed to be said that you shouldn't fucking well do that, you bastard. And if you do, I'll never speak another word to you in me fucking life."

The rain cannons off the windows.

He can hear the breath frothing in Tim's throat, and the heart thunderous in his chest.

The venom in his wound sheds that faint odor of death which, unwanted, waters his dry and aching mouth.

"I understand," he says, and snaps Tim's neck.

* * *

Her phone rings freaking _again_ as she is tapping her ruler to the tiny little squiggle of a jugular on the human outline she has chalked onto her board, and with a sigh she exaggerates just enough to let both these boys know exactly how well she takes interruptions, she silences it once again.

"Well, someone's rather persistent. Don't you think perhaps you should get that, sweetheart?" Klaus asks, re-crossing the boots she has told him _eight times now_ to take off his desk.

"No," she replies crisply. "Because I, unlike some people, understand how rude it is to interrupt during class."

* * *

"If it makes you feel any better," he says as soon as Tim wakes, "I regretted it soon as you hit the floor."

"Fuck off," Tim tells him, and he does.

* * *

But the tenth call in as many minutes obliterates her patience, she's just a _monster_ , she's not superhuman, after all, and to Dean she says, "Oh my God, I'm so sorry, I'll take care of this really quickly," and darts out a hand for the phone.

Klaus at least has left to go meet some contact or another, so there's no smirk to endure, or commentary to try and ignore, it's just this one little teensy newborn blinking at her from his desk, his sweat noisily making its way from throat to collarbone, God, she just loves it when they look at her and they see past the blonde hair, the pink nails, the cute little flounced skirt she wore today in this soft springtime green, sometimes she thinks, they're really starting to see: it's not just Klaus they need to fear.

She smiles to herself and hits the 'accept' button. "Who the _hell_ is this, and also, someone better be dead, because seriously-"

"Caroline," a man interrupts, and he sounds so solemn that for a moment she doesn't quite recognize him.

"Kol?" she ventures tentatively.

"Is Nik anywhere near by?" he asks. "I don't hear him right now."

She sets down the ruler in her hand. "No, he left a little while ago. It's just me and one of my students right now."

"I'm not even going to ask about that. Get rid of him. Nik can't hear this. I don't want it getting passed along to him."

She frowns. "Okaaay." She lowers the phone, pressing it to her shoulder. "Hey, Dean, just work on this review, ok?" She flourishes a paper at him from her desk. "It's mostly multiple choice, but there are a few essay questions. I'm just going to slip out and take this call, ok? Business."

She blurs down into the living room and beyond, out into the street, where Dean's newly awakened ears are not yet attuned enough to reach, and lifts the phone back to her mouth. "Ok, what is going on? And is Rebekah with you, by the way? Because she just all of a sudden took off, and I have something I need to discuss with her-"

"I need you to get some of Nik's blood," he says, and her stomach drops.

* * *

She can taste her heart in her throat.

The grandfather clock gives three soft bongs and then dies abruptly.

There is always something in the air when he approaches. Perhaps you are too young to know exactly which portent it is that weights the shoulders, cramps the belly, wets the hands, but there is in his walk that certain presage of _something_ , you can feel the world flinch back just a little, and with haunted eyes wonder where does he go, what does he hail-

And oh God, you know, she thought when he cradled her on that couch and he choked on her name, and the first warm gurgle of that blood dampened her lips, and sweetened her throat- she'd never be afraid of him again.

The day is too warm for a coat.

He is wearing that Henley rolled up to the elbows when he steps into the house, the sun gilding his hair.

"Is class over already?" he asks, smiling at her so sweetly she wants to believe, she could just ask him, she could just ask him and say it's for your brother, it's for your _brother_ , Klaus, and he'd just hand over his blood and his blessing.

But you can't take that risk with him.

She works up her best smile. "Yeah, he was doing really well. I let him go early. I was thinking- I've been thinking about it for a while, actually, but maybe it's a good idea with all these werewolves running around and the full moon so close if you give me a vial of your blood or something for me to keep, in case I'm out by myself and something happens?"

He stares at her.

She hears the clock ticking away its seconds with clicks that ring her very bones.

He can hear her heart, oh God for _sure_ he can hear her heart, and guess that no mundane request stirs it quite like this, wakes the sweat on her forehead and knocks the knees just subtly against one another- he'll look at her plastered smile and her too-wide eyes and he'll see, as he always does, all the way to her lie-

She takes a deep breath.

He cocks his head. "Why right now? Are you planning on going somewhere?"

"No," she says too quickly, and takes a moment to smooth her voice, to straighten her knees, to imagine herself back to that valedictorian podium where her voice did not waver, and her audience never guessed: this girl has lost so, so much, from these bleachers where all her friends are missing.

"I just figured that I should mention it while I'm thinking about it, you know? Because next time it comes up, it'll be when I really need it, and I'd kinda' rather have it before then. I could wear it around my neck or something."

He seats himself on the arm of Elijah's favorite chair, studying her in that creepy way he does, from beneath his eyebrows, where you just know he sees freaking _everything_.

"It's a good idea, don't you think?" she prompts him.

There is the eerie silence of a snowed-in morning, when all the world has lain down to sleep, and for miles the Earth does not know whether it will wake.

And then he blinks.

She sees the hands folded on his knees unfurl, and inside her chest something loosens just slightly, she realizes, oh God, oh _God_ , he has wrestled and triumphed over his suspicions just for her, and will give her anything, throw aside his paranoia, his instinctive mistrust, his automatic wariness, this is Caroline, _his_ Caroline, and she said, with her hands on his cheeks, and her forehead pressed to his, it's me, it's you, forever.

For so long, he understood everything but that.

She's going to throw up, and this is such a nice dress.

"I've been meaning for a while to give you just such a thing, just in case. Since you're always darting about without me," he says, smiling at her.

She laces her hands behind her back, so he can't see them shaking. "Do you think you could give it to me right now, since we're talking about it?"

* * *

"There's a flight to Dublin leaving in an hour. I'm on my way to the airport right now. I guess we see if customs is on vervain, because I don't have a passport."

He looks up at Christchurch Cathedral, and wipes some of the rain from his chin. "Give me your flight number, and I'll meet you inside the Dublin airport. Your phone probably won't work over here, so I'll just keep an eye out for where it's coming in. Hurry along any of the layovers if you can; I don't know how long he's got left. We'll probably be cutting it close, Caroline."

"BA0048. Just get him to the airport," she says, and in the background he hears a horn blare. "I'll be there. I promise."

She hangs up.

He shuts his eyes for a moment, and pockets his phone.

* * *

Klaus' SUV she abandons on a random city block.

Her purse she tosses over a shoulder and she walks right into the airport with her head up, her smile bright, please dear whatever God in heaven, let them not be on vervain, she prays, and flounces up to the ticket counter.

* * *

He lets Tim alone for perhaps an hour, and then whisks silently back into the church. "Caroline's coming," he says, holding up both hands when Tim whirls round with the most thunderous look he's ever seen on his face. "I know you're mad at me. I'm sorry; I really am. But you don't need to die because I'm a tit. You can hit me with my bat, anywhere you like. Except the face." Tim clenches his jaw. "Or you can hit me in the face, just this once." He takes a step forward, his hands still out in front of him. "Just come to the airport with me. That's all you have to do, and then you don't have to talk to me ever again, if you like."

* * *

The first acceleration of the plane jerks her back into her seat as she's leaning forward to adjust the safety card, and as the plane rattles around her, the overhead baggage is agitated within its compartments, the three children in front of her press their awed noses to steam the window, she realizes suddenly, this is the first time she's ever flown.

The tarmac outside the window vanishes into one long stream; the yellow lines dissolve; the wings bounce.

Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the little TV in the seatback beside her flash a brief glimpse of Katniss Everdeen's smiling face.

The man on the other side of her sips from a water bottle he has brought on board with him.

The engines become a roar, a thunder, a tempest, she brings her hands up to cup her ears, there is a sudden lift at the front of the plane, beneath her feet the world drops, the wheels retract, she feels the clunk of something or another winding smoothly back up into the belly of the plane, there is the strange bottoming of her gut, and the pressure of all this stale and cast-off air-

She clamps her hands around the armrests, her heart pounding.

The plane climbs, climbs, she sees so far beneath her the airport shrink, the cars contract to pale children's toys, humming smoothly along their model streets-

And then the first cloud shrouds the plane, and she feels the first testing jar of turbulence.

Ok, ok, not bad at all, she can take a little bouncing, _totally_ no biggie, she'll just take out her magazine, rifle its pages as casually as any of the unruffled passengers sitting oblivious around her-

The plane drops.

She screams.

* * *

Somehow, he talks Tim into the car he has stolen, where he will spend at least the next ten hours languishing in an airport car park, awaiting his fate.

His pissy silence is rather short-lived.

Round midnight, he begins to throw up.

He's quite pathetic, with the back door open, head in his hands, just heaving onto his nice dress shoes, but you don't pity a man you've just killed; he's not apt to take anything other than meek silence very well.

But he does, when Tim has finally passed out in the back seat, carefully crawl out of the driver's seat and into the back with him, so he can at least sit and stroke the sleeping head, with its still-drying bangs plastered down over the forehead.

He looks younger without his hat, and the fever high in his cheeks.

He died his third and most final time alone on the Gilbert's kitchen floor, and oh, if Nik had been just a bit sooner.

No man should go out like that.

So when Tim's sleep is deepest, and the sweat thickest on his forehead, he lies down on the seat beside him, and takes the head onto his shoulder, because somewhere, somewhere (he ought to know, after all, drowsing away Earth's best years under Nik's dagger), a dreamer can be touched even in the farthest reaches of his armored Wonderland.

Forgive him his self-absorption; he's had nowhere else to put it.

Of course he's not ready for you to leave.

Of course for a moment, he thought, to hell with you, to hell with _you_ , what about _me_ , but he knows: that's the whole point of loving someone.

* * *

He does move once more to the driver's seat when Tim resurfaces from time to time, and has to empty what little is left in him onto the pavement, but perhaps five hours in, Tim forgets he's angry, or his illness has superseded it, he says, "I don't think I'm going to make it."

He says: "I'm scared, you bastard", and chokes on the last word.

"Shh. You're going to be all right."

"I got gut-shot once, in the Civil War. That's what this feels like, except everywhere. I don't want to die, I don't want to die- but oh, God, just to stop it-"

He twists round in his seat. "You're only being a big baby about it; you know how you get when you so much as stub a toe. Just breathe, darling."

"Fuck you," Tim rasps, but he does inhale deeply, and lean his head back against the door, his nostrils flaring, his Adam's apple working, the pale forehead skin wrinkling, disrupting the beads of sweat along his hairline. "If I live-" he rolls his eyes toward the driver's seat, "if I live, the offer of hitting you in the face with your bat still stands."

He reaches back to clasp the hand dangling limply off the seat, and runs his thumb over Tim's. "Then you have something to live for, don't you?"

* * *

The rain has stopped when Tim begins to hallucinate.

He listens to it dripping off the roof of the car, and landing thunderously on the painted lines, to Tim's laboring lungs, his struggling heart, to the earliest of the morning flights touching their great wheels smoothly to the tarmac.

There's a body in the back seat, Tim tells him.

It changes everything.

And then later: What do you think me poor Ma is going to say, when she realizes her son is a pervert, a murderer, a drunkard, she would have wanted me to just die, she would have wanted me to just _die_ , lad, ah, _God_ -

He knows the feeling.

But he tells Tim: it's all right.

She loves you anyway.

It's just what mothers do.

* * *

He has to alternate the heater and the air conditioner as Tim shivers through one feverish wave and then opens his shirt to endure the next, and there is a moment, when he's vomiting onto the floor through his nose because he hasn't the strength to open the door anymore where he thinks, to mercifully crack the ribs, and snatch the heart still-warm from its heaving chest- wouldn't that be far kinder than to let him lie here in his own blood, his drool, his vomit, all that sticky mishmash of fever sweat and mucus- if a man begs for his own death, is it for anyone to play God merely because oh, they're going to miss him so bloody _much_?

He licks his lips.

He looks out the window.

"Tim," he says shakily, and wipes his hands on his trousers. "Do you really want to die?"

He's a while thinking about that, spitting out the last of his bile.

"You have to be really sure. I can't do it unless…unless you just can't go on."

Tim scrapes in a wheezing breath that sounds like one of his last.

"But I'll make it quick, if you need me to."

He hears the creak of the seat settling, and at last looks back to see Tim roll his head onto the cushions, and he thinks, the arms spread out as they are, the eyes half-shut, the mouth red with blood, but the forehead free of tension- he thinks here finally is surrender, and for a moment he cannot breathe.

He's just used to sounding brave, he's just used to the good front, and how it must be pasted over everything, he's not sure at all, can he really reach into the chest, touch the heart which has lulled him many a time to sleep, close the long-lashed eyes so the boy is already a corpse, and his pulse merely a formality- be really sure, Tim, be so bloody _certain_.

"No," Tim gurgles. "I don't want to die. I don't want to die at all."

* * *

That first rosy mist of Ireland's uniquely wet dawns has veiled the airport when Tim says, "Kol" in his most somber confessional voice.

He touches the damp forehead, feels the limp hair, runs his fingers down the smooth cheek and over the brief roughness along the jaw, where most of his pitiful stubble has accumulated.

"I still think you're a fuck, for what you did to me at the church."

* * *

He opens his eyes.

The sun has melted over the window of their car.

Tim is breathing fitfully in his arms; they are both curled up on the backseat he has cleaned as well as he can in between Tim's vomiting, but neither of their suits will ever be the same again.

Elijah would despair.

There is some tiny giveaway, somewhere in the world: perhaps the scrape of a far-off shoe, the huff of a distant breath, the proclamation of whatever perfume this person has doused themselves in, and for miles advertises to the public.

He sits up.

Tim stirs.

He sees, through the front window, a woman approaching the car.

She's not particularly official-looking, but they have been parked here for nearly nine hours now; someone was bound to come checking for murder victims sooner or later.

"What is it?" Tim asks softly, blinking hazily up at him.

"Stay here. Caroline should be landing in a few hours. That's all the longer you have to hold on for, all right? You're going to be ok. Just lie here and be quiet, whatever hallucinogenic ravings might take you. I'll just compel her and be right back."

He climbs carefully over Tim and pops the door.

"Hello, darling," he greets her, and flashes his best smile.

"Are you Kol Mikaelson?" she asks.

He stops and glances back toward the car, narrowing his eyes when he has once more returned his attention to her. "I'm sorry, I haven't had the honor. But I better very quickly, or you'll be missing your head."

"I have something for you," she says instead, and opens her purse.

* * *

Kol is waiting for her at the customs booth when she lands, looking uncharacteristically terrible as he flirts with the officer behind the counter, who seems flattered nevertheless.

She breaks into a run. "I'm here! It's here! Where's Tim? Why didn't you bring _him_ here? We could have _minutes_ , Kol, you don't know, it varies from werewolf to werewolf, how long their venom takes to-"

He grabs her by the shoulders and whisks her off to the side, bidding a smirky good-bye to the customs officer. "You're too late, Caroline."

"What do you mean I'm too late- oh my God, oh my _God_ , is he _dead_?"

"No," Kol replies, fixing the curls which have gone a little lank on her shoulders. "By the way, darling, no offense, but you look terrible."

"I didn't sleep for the entire plane ride. And what do you mean _I_ look terrible? Isn't that dried vomit I see on your suit?"

"Tim had a rather rough night."

"Yeah, hmm, speaking of that guy- what the hell _happened_?"

"Well, it was a dark and stormy night. We had just seen _Romeo and Juliet_ at the Gate Theatre -very nice, you should pop in while you're here- and left rather abruptly when Bekah decided to usurp the role of Juliet. Tim, being a gentlemen, decided to leave my sister and I to work out our differences, and went for a walk-"

"I mean the part where you said I'm too late, but he's alive? Was just wondering if it's not too much trouble for you to elaborate on that."

He takes her purse as they compel her past customs, and snaps it open so he can rifle through it, his brow furrowing as he reaches the bottom. "There's nothing in here I like," he scolds her, and tosses it back.

"You're a twenty-first century woman. You carry your own purse, darling," he says when she gives him a look.

" _Tim_ ," she snaps.

"Tim, right. Already cured."

There is a brief moment of stunned silence while this sinks in. " _What_?"

"We were waiting for you in the car park, when some compelled woman comes up to us and hands it off. Sound like the handiwork of anyone you know?"

She stops in the middle of the airport; Kol good-naturedly prods her on to one of the food stalls where he shoplifts three sandwiches and a children's juice box. " _Klaus_ did this? Klaus set this whole freaking thing up?"

"I think that's our safest bet. And since A. Tim isn't dead, that obviously wasn't his objective, and B. You're here, and not moldering in his dungeon, he let you go. Which would suggest to me that the whole point was to get you out of New Orleans."

"Maybe he didn't let me go; maybe I just tricked him."

"I believe modern sarcasm dictates this is the part where I say, "Oh, that's sweet", but dumbness never is, darling. Not even ironically."

She wonders if for just a moment, sandwich in one hand, juice box in the other, he has dropped his guard enough for her to hit him, or at least kick him in the shin or maybe push him over the railing of the stairs he escorts her to.

The car is a little white Kia Tim has parked in the 'coach' loading zone, where he leans against the driver's door, still a little pale, the collar of his shirt brown with his healed injury.

"Is he wearing normal people clothes?" she asks, stopping again.

Kol loops his arm around her neck, eating his sandwich over her head.

"Knock it _off_."

"Well, I don't see what the big deal is, darling, it's not like you've washed it recently."

Tim is leaning more heavily than normal on the car door, she can see as they jog down the stairs to the loading zone, and Kol waves him into the car, where he turns suddenly into a psychotic mother hen, tossing both the leftover sandwiches to Tim and cramming the straw of the juice box which has already been opened and half-drunk into his mouth.

"Oh, and this," he says, and snatches a nearby woman, heaving her into the car.

" _Kol_! You can't just kidnap people in front of everyone!"

"No one cares; people disappear every day, Caroline."

"Ok, but you kinda' just snatched her in front of like thirty people!"

He holds his hands out to either side. "And did anyone even blink? Society these days, I swear, darling. You know, back in my day-"

She pops the passenger door and the woman scrambles out, fleeing toward a bus which has just pulled in ahead of them.

"That wasn't very nice," Kol tells her.

"Neither is kidnapping and murder. So I kind of think my sin is slightly outweighed here." She tosses her purse into the car, and begins to crawl in after it when the smell which she has been too distracted to notice just _consumes_ her, and she backs hastily out, clutching the purse to her chest. "I'm not sitting back there! There's dried vomit everywhere."

"Right," Kol says. "That was a little insensitive of us."

He walks over to the car which noses itself in behind them, and bashes the driver's head against the window when he gets out, then tosses the man into the road. "Your chariot, darling."

He gestures theatrically at the car.

* * *

The drive into Dublin is silent.

You can feel the weight of all the grief, anger, disappointment, whatever it is they have stacked between them- people, they build such walls with nothing more than silence, entire trembling structures which are constructed with nothing and must be felled with everything.

It's disconcerting to watch Tim leave his hands in his lap and Kol keep his on the wheel.

Kol drives like a maniac, whipping in between cars, braking at the last moment, choosing at random which side of the yellow line it is he likes best, and she thinks this at least ought to inspire some good-natured bickering, here is where Tim dons once more his role of Husband and scolds him for rattling the teeth out of their company, but he only leans his head against the window, and braces one arm against the dash when Kol stops so suddenly she smacks her head on the back of his seat.

So her first glimpse of Dublin is tainted.

She stepped finally from her one tiny box and she shook the native dust from her feet and what she should have felt, disembarking that plane with just the one bag over her shoulder, one tiny girl amidst all these thousands of years and millions of people whose accents she will sometimes not understand, whose cultures will baffle her, whose cities will terrify her-

There was supposed to be an awakening.

She was supposed to watch the first church break the gathering clouds with infant eyes.

She was supposed to just stand for a moment and inhale this new world, taste the unfamiliar grass and all the hidden mosses of a thousand rained-out crevices, touch with her first tentative steps the slick novelty of what are in fact actual freaking _cobblestones_ -

She kind of wants to knock their heads together.

He's alive, you _love_ him, there's forever, there's a _world_ and no fetters of age, infirmity, money-

Jerks.

Kol pulls up in front of a hotel called the Grafton Capital and gets out wordlessly.

Tim opens the car door for her and lets her precede him through the hotel's revolving door, then leads her up the stairs to the second floor where they are staying in some swanky suite, which they have pretty much trashed, she sees as she enters the room.

Several of Charles Dickens' novels are scattered across the bed, a pair of pants that must be one of Tim's hanging over a chair in the corner, the trash overflowing with cigarette packets and empty bottles of alcohol, one of them just shattered carelessly on the tile in front of the vanity counter outside the bathroom, there is on one of the nightstands what appears to be drug paraphernalia, and on the corner writing table actual cocaine, she can smell all their myriad sins, the lingering sting of the cigarette smoke and the strange medicinal hint of what might be the cocaine, the copper must of long-dried blood, which itches still her unfulfilled gums.

"Ok, so you guys are pigs."

Tim at least has the common decency to look somewhat ashamed.

Kol just lounges back in the chair with the pants across their back, and puts his hands behind his head.

She waits until Tim has disappeared into the bathroom and the shower has thunderously started to turn on him and demand, "What the hell is going on with you two?"

"Keep your voice down. Tim and I had a little row, that's all. Or a couple."

"You were fighting with him while he was _dying_?"

"He did start it." Kol puts his feet up on the desk in front of him and for a moment looks so like his brother she feels this little squeezing in her gut. "Anyway, it's not really any of your business. What do you want to do?"

"What do you mean?"

"There are approximately twenty five pubs within walking distance, and the river is perhaps five minutes away at human speed. We could drown someone. Or knock over one of the statues on O'Connell Street. They just put them back up, I saw. They had a couple of oopsies the last time I got really drunk."

She looks pointedly at the garbage can. "Which was every day, apparently."

"Don't look so judgmental." He rolls his chair over to the writing table in the corner with a shove of his feet against the desk. "Cocaine?"

" _No_. God, let a cleaning lady in here once in a while, would you?"

"We did. I ate her. So that didn't work out very well."

"There's this thing called self-restraint you might want to try practicing once in a while."

Kol tilts his chair back and rubs his chin contemplatively, squinting up at her in confusion. "Haven't heard of it."

She rolls her eyes. "Why don't you go make up with your boyfriend and then you can go out and play."

Something shifts in his eyes; she can hear him swallow, the deafening increase of his heartbeat, that nervous lathering of the belly you can hear if for a moment you dumb your ears to the world and to your instinctively exploring senses which stretch out for the three men below the window and the child in the hallway say nope, sorry, not right now, there is before you something of far more interest, import, vulnerability, and always, always, the head comes around, the ears snap off, the teeth lengthen in premature anticipation.

"What did you do?"

He rubs the little dimple in his chin and looks out the window, and for a moment, she thinks he is almost uncomfortable, she thinks he doesn't have much practice at it, but he does remember the faint twinges of it, and with whatever is left of that far human boy, regrets whatever it is he has done.

"I acted like Nik," he says at last.

There is in the lobby a sudden explosion of familiar complaining, and just a few seconds later, that same shrill bitching in the hall just outside the room.

Rebekah bursts inside with some guy dressed in a suit on her heels, four shopping bags in either of his hands. She loudly instructs him to place them on the bed, _carefully_ , so they don't touch the books or anything else 'what's-his-face' has dirtied with his filthy plebeian hands, then crosses her arms and whirls on her brother. "We have a problem, Kol."

"You realize Tim and I have had sex at least a thousand times in that bed." He runs a hand over his face, sounding so tired that for a moment she wants to tuck him in, bring him milk, just for a moment sit stroking the stubbled cheek which much look so young, loose with sleep. "He's all right, in case you were wondering."

"I'm aware, you idiot. Caroline's here, the shower is running, you're not out grief-murdering the population. I said we have a problem."

The shower has been shut off; she listens to the plinking of the final drops.

"The two of you just ran off, this man, whatever his name is, was worried-"

"Enzo," the suited man cuts in, with the kind of smile that says you're going to remember that name for so long.

"Did I ask?" Rebekah snaps. "Anyway, he was worried, so I allowed him to take me shopping to distract him."

"You're such a philanthropist, Bekah."

"I brought the white oak stake here with me to Ireland. I had it with me when we left this room. And now, I don't."

Kol swings the chair from side to side, just looking at her.

She can hear the rustle of Tim dressing in the bathroom, and then the gush of the faucet.

"The white oak stake is _gone_ , Kol."

"Nik took it."

Rebekah immediately blanches. "Nik's here?"

"No, but someone who's working for him is running round Dublin. I'm sure they're already on a plane back to New Orleans. Did you really think you could steal it from him and just fly free into the world, with his unspoken blessing? It's the one thing that can kill us, Bekah. He's not going to leave it in anyone's hands but his own."

The bathroom door opens; Tim steps out and wordlessly grabs the jacket which is draped across one of the bed posts, nodding briefly to Enzo.

"This is all _your_ fault, Kol. If you could take just a moment to look up the word 'subtle' in this thing called a dictionary, Nik never would have been able to trace us so easily, but of course your handiwork is all over this country-"

"No one asked you to come, darling."

"I had to go somewhere; Nik was being insufferable."

"It's so nice to be your afterthought, darling. 'Nik's annoying me; what was that other one's name again? I suppose I'll look him up'," Kol mocks in a pretty credible imitation of her voice.

"What is your problem?" she snaps. "I thought you'd be grateful-"

"Absolutely, darling; you know how much I enjoy a few scraps of attention because Nik's been bad and needs to learn that if he can't shape up, you might do something dramatic like fuck some self-esteem back into yourself with the one person you know isn't going anywhere."

And suddenly they are shrieking at one another, Kol out of his chair, Rebekah putting to good use the empty bottles in the trash can, Tim quietly easing her out of the way as one of those bottles splinters against the wall just a few inches from her head, in the midst of all this the Enzo guy watching with great interest, and Tim quietly putting on the hat he's retrieved from who knows where, and now with the cap situated, the jacket buttoned to the throat, he slips out into the hall.

She chases after him, and grabs his arm. "Where are you going?"

He looks down at her, slightly startled, his pocket crinkling where he clenches down suddenly on what must be his cigarettes. "Uh…just out to walk for a bit. Down to the river, or maybe to Trinity College."

She shuts the door hastily behind her as another bottle wings this way; it shatters loudly.

Rebekah yells something about a dress; there is the sound of what must be Napoleon's entire Russian assault, the thunk of what she is pretty sure is a book spine hitting the wall, Tim winces, a window is flung open, the day magnifies, she smells how the homeless have been using the alleyway out back of the hotel, and the drunks its dumpster, and grips his arm a little harder. "Can I come? And by the way- was Kol saying he and Rebekah _did it_?"

"Better not to ask," he sighs, and walks away down the hall.

* * *

Trinity College funnels its parents, its students, its tourists through a a slick black gate which, freshened daily with its thousand new coats, gleams as though just painted.

For all its reputation, here at least Ireland is one passionless cell block of gray river, gray streets, gray buildings, the fog has climbed too often from the Liffey and now lives in its stones, the people tramp not so much miserably as resignedly from squall to squall, wielding their umbrellas, their hoods, their bags, one damp bus after another spits its own fog-colored breath, and lurches away despairingly, but the courtyard, the courtyard-

First you pass through the gate, and if there is that first tender prickle of a new country, a new ocean, a new _people_ still within your wild young heart, you think, they don't make gates like this in _America_ , you think, no American hand has shaped a roof so fine, a wall so well, the doors loom straight from your books, and hold still within their cracks those historical fingerprints where the old hands have brushed, and the book bags bumped.

Then the shelter of the small little gatehouse, carriage parking spot, whatever it's supposed to be, where for a moment the snowed-in walls, anonymous beneath months of lessons advertisements, babysitting opportunities, club invitations banish the rain, and the cobblestones are slyly dry, that you might think Ireland has its little spots of desert, whatever claims the sky-

And then back out into the rain, into the wind, put your hands hastily to your thighs if you want to preserve the modesty of your shy young tour guide, and here's where you remember the postcards.

The lawns are neatly trimmed, and preserved with chains and the warning signs which proclaim in both Irish and English to keep off the grass.

They have to be painted, Photoshopped, phony, you're going to think.

You're going to think: but there's never been a green like this, you could touch your soft little skirt with the hand-stirred dyes to the blades, and mistake it for bland sea foam rather than crown emeralds.

The buildings sprout, gray, from their cobblestone beds. Between their bricks she can smell where the chinks have grown fine green beards, that musty damp forest scent of the heavy wooden doors, and beyond them, the glass cases of careful libraries, which are to be admired rather than studied.

There are a thousand, perhaps a million books with their fresh bindings newly cracked, and their pages hardly pencil-dented. A thousand more, which are barely dust and spider web.

Ahead of her, a man sweeps about those elaborate gestures of the particularly theatrical tour guide.

"Do you want to see the Book of Kells?" Tim asks, looking up from his lighter, one eyebrow cocked, so that for just a slight moment he looks maybe a little rakish beneath his hat, his next cigarette already steaming.

"What's that?"

"Old manuscript. You see that line over there?" he points across the courtyard. "That's the door you go through to view it. You have to buy tickets beforehand." He looks away, takes a long draw on his cigarette, scuffs his foot just a little. "I'll take you meself, if you like. Everyone likes to have a gawp at it."

"I think I'm just going to look around right now. You don't have to babysit me, if you don't want to."

"Ah, that's ok," he says, not looking at her, exhaling another long gust of smoke.

Ok.

Well, then, buddy, everyone shoulders their load.

She hooks her arm through his, and tries not to smile when he stiffens and subtly shifts so there is another inch or so between them. "Then you get to play tour guide."

"Uh…all right, then. What do you want to know?"

"How old is this place? Did anybody famous graduate from here? Did you go here when you were a human or anything? What the hell is that huge metal ball thingy? What's this building? And that one?"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," he says in a mildly panicked voice, taking the cigarette from his lips and tossing it into a nearby puddle. "Lob them a little slower, would you?"

"How-old-is-this-place-"

He looks at her.

It is a singular talent of quiet people, she's found, that one look just totally _does_ it, you know instantly what a talker would have had to gibber away at for a solid five minutes.

"So?" she asks, and flips her wet hair a little. You don't quail Caroline Forbes with a look, after all, did she ever tell you about that one time this football player actually had to immediately rush off to the bathroom to empty his terrified bladder after an unauthorized questioning of punch bowl placement?

So the fable goes.

(He didn't make it, by the way.)

She hands him the umbrella he stole for her back on O'Connell Bridge.

"I don't know how old it is. Lots of famous people have studied here- lots of the old Irish writers, you know, Oscar Wilde and the like; I went here for a bit back in the 20s, so I was already…you know. The 'huge metal ball thingy' is some modern artsy shite -crap- this building is the library, and that one is one of the lecture halls."

"If you kept track of them all perfectly, why'd you ask me to slow down with the questions?" she demands, jerking him toward one of the lawns, where she has just spotted a pathway.

He stumbles a little.

"You'll use up me quota of talking."

"Ok, first lesson, you never ration something like that. Second, whatever weirdo bad boy amble that's supposed to be is gonna' have to pick. Up. The. Pace." She snaps her fingers to emphasize each word. "We're sightseeing, not murder strutting."

She's not sure, but she thinks he's trying not to laugh. "What the hell -the heck- is 'murder strutting'?"

"You hang out with Kol. You know."

And because that name stiffens him a little more, you can see whatever has been erected between them pains him somewhere right around where she can at this moment feel a boy back in New Orleans, perhaps fingering his little Caroline pawn which has neatly taken its spot on the board, she whirls him away around one of the buildings, which must too be pointed at, exclaimed over, posed beside.

You forget, when you first step off the plane and there is a whole new world which must be sniffed around and probed at that every craft has its phantom cargo of spurned lover, hurt mother, fuming daughter, what hurts are set aside for those more pressing concerns of poor food, petrifying turbulence, flatulent neighbor are wheeled back around with that first clanking revolve of baggage claims, which spits up such familiar fetters as it materializes battered luggage.

It's just-

He wasn't supposed to use _her_.

And you think, sure, it's just a tiny step, he has to feel his way carefully, you can tell he's fumbling around in the dark, he's so uncertain, where does he place his foot, does his hand go here, should he set it there, and of course there are the moments of which even the unflagging despair, when he instead backs the foot and withdraws the hand, you wonder, did you, after all, place your faith with such blind stupidity as that far away girl whose fairytales failed her, God, _so_ badly-

But he was moving.

If you did not think one day, you'll dress him in armor, and he'll sit a white horse, still you knew, he was _trying_.

If his smiles didn't lie, and his hands drew no fabled tenderness on her back, still you don't vault your self-doubts in a day, and leave them behind forever.

So she wasn't good enough, smart enough, _necessary_ enough, he had to pull this shitty, shitty stunt so his brother knows: you will never escape, and she is sure: in his universe there is only one sun, and if for a while he loans his heart, he will never gift his trust.

The sun is, at this moment, contemplating an appearance.

It puts out feelers.

It has to tiptoe out behind one cloud and then another, and she sees around her the tourists intent upon its struggles, and the locals impervious to its presence.

Perhaps his is just rising.

Maybe it touches his sleeping head in his rumpled bed, sluices down the naked back with one great wash of gold, stains the sheets, buffs the pillows, gilds the one curl that always escapes unruly down his forehead.

Tim holds the umbrella silently.

She can feel his scratchy coat against her arm.

"Can I tell you something that's going to be way too TMI and is going to make you so uncomfortable?" she asks, but it's not for permission, she doesn't need his blessing, it's a warning, because sometimes, some things, they're just too big.

For a moment, when he looks at her, and she sees he's not exasperated, he's not bemused, he's just so young, and you can see in his eyes that her voice has cracked, the first tear has run that annoying track right down the side of the nose, you can see he doesn't know for what, but he's sorry you're hurting, he's sorry there is in all this world anyone who knows the tightness of the chest, and that burning in the throat-

She thinks about how he couldn't stay human, not in this world.

Maybe she couldn't either.

"I just don't know what to do," she says, and she thinks it's going to come out ok, she thinks, she's Caroline Forbes, she's got this, and then she bursts into tears.

"I just don't know what this means- he was such a jerk he could have just told me- he could have just told me to _leave_ , I am so used to hearing that you know, and my mom just died and I'm still trying to figure out what the hell you _do_ when you can't just call her up and maybe she doesn't know any better either, but she's not going to let you do it alone and I know he's not human he seriously made some guy _eat his own baby_ but you know I was dealing with that, I was dealing with the fact that human laws just don't mean the same thing to him and one day they're not going to mean the same thing to me, and I was getting to where I was ok with that, but he was supposed to stop hurting his family, he was supposed to stop hurting _me_ , he wasn't supposed to _use_ us anymore."

She is led over to something, she can't even see it at first, but there's movement, there's the blurry glide of first the surely staring faces and then that vague blotch of lawn, and finally what must be a bench underneath her, wet stone, she feels that, she feels that, and a hand gripping her by the elbow, she can hear those muffled whispers which the humans shoot off beneath their conspiratorial hands, loud as cannons, and she's sorry, she's _sorry_ , how humiliating is this, how far down her cheeks must her makeup be streaked, but didn't she tell herself long before Mom left and Stefan didn't care anymore and Elena stopped calling, it's _ok_ , whatever she feels, it's _hers_ , you don't apologize for what's raw, what's you, so she guesses just fuck her freaking mascara-

"Here, then," Tim says gently, and offers his sleeve.

She stares at it for a moment, and then pats it against her face, smearing makeup, snot, drool, all down the length of it, which for a moment makes her cry harder, so she has to just sit with it pressed to her lips, until the next flood has subsided at least enough for it to even be worth trying again.

"I'm sorry," she gasps, hiccuping. "I got snot all over your coat."

"It's all right," he says, letting her clutch it against her nose. "It's a very old coat."

"I'm sorry Klaus had you bitten." She hiccups again, and wipes her nose once more.

"Well, that's not your fault. He's an arsehole."

She stutters what she thinks might be a laugh against his sleeve, and squeezes her eyes shut against it. "He is. Can I say 'arsehole', or am I too American?"

"Sure," he tells her good-naturedly. "As long as you don't laugh when I try to pronounce me 'threes'."

"Say 'thirty three'," she sobs, stifling a fresh wave on the poor coat sleeve.

"Tirty tree," he replies, probably hamming it up just a little with his brogue, patiently holding up his arm so she can just maul the sleeve.

"You can't talk." She sniffles the breath back into her, wipes a spot of drool off her lip that she can feel crawling toward her chin, gives another good dash beneath each eye, so that she pulls his arm away black. "Sorry; I'm really sorry, this is probably some kind of heirloom or whatever, I mean, all your clothes are like eight hundred years old, I really hope you can dry clean this out-"

"I've got another, if I can't. Just keep it there, till you're all right."

She opens her mouth on a laugh that hurts. "That would take a really long time."

"Well, lucky then. That's exactly how long you've got."

He keeps his arm cocked at face angle, but it's got to slow eventually, every flood is eventually a trickle, and what are the chances of him sitting in his bed, crying rather than crowing, so she takes a couple of breaths that expand her chest to pain, she wipes her eyes one more time, and she realizes: the clouds are no longer vague watermarks, the faces are suddenly human flesh and not soft wax, the buildings once more stand with earthly resolve rather than Atlantis waver.

Tim lowers his arm slowly.

The umbrella has nodded forward; it has begun to rain sometime in between the sun's Herculean labors and her noisy breakdown.

She watches it shot put out over the brim of Tim's cap, feels it sting her eyes, her nose, her lips, all the parts which are selfish with grief, and to all other sensations blinded.

The tourists have begun to dash for the buildings, to shelter under its roofs and be warmed by stale halls which, ten eons thick in the dust of those vellum mummies which must be nursed back to books, are at least dry, windless, painless.

Each drop takes little bites from her hands, and she holds them both out, she thinks, hey, hey-

It _hurts_.

She will feel again something that's not in her chest, that's not blocking her throat, that does not usurp her head, and to the smallest parts of her whisper you see, you see- we always told you.

You always have to wonder, after a cry like that.

You always forget, in that one jagged moment, what anything felt like before.

Tim takes out his cigarettes, protecting them carefully from the rain, and holds them out to her.

"No, thanks."

He drops the umbrella; her hair is ruined anyway, and his hat soaked.

He lights one of his cigarettes, and sits with his elbows on his knees, hunching over it.

It's kind of fascinating, watching him triumph over all these conspiracies of wind and rain, and keep the end faithfully burning, each of his breaths the same color as the sky.

"Your weather kind of sucks."

"Sorry. I didn't make it."

She looks over at him, all 6' 3" of him curved over this stupid cigarette, the hat dripping steadily, the hair at the nape of his neck running its own steady stream down his jacket, each tap of wet ash landing on his shoe, and punctuated with a "Fuck!" he tries to cover with a cough or a sudden throat clear or, once, an awkwardly-spaced 'fuu…chsia' that knocks this laugh right, stunned, out of her.

"Most people say 'fudge'."

"It was the first thing that popped into me head." He finishes the cigarette and flicks it onto the pathway, straightening.

"You know you can cuss in front of me. I went to high school. I've heard an 'F' word or two in my day. I might have even used it."

"Me moth- I was taught it's not polite, like."

She smoothes her hands over her damp skirt, crossing her ankles and tucking both feet under the bench. "You can mention your mom. It's ok."

He adjusts the hat, crosses his arms, is not satisfied with this, lifts one knee to his other ankle, bounces the leg nervously, picks at some imaginary flaw or another on his pants. "I wouldn't have wanted anyone to pick at it when me own mother first…you know."

"Died? That's what they do eventually, all of them. I just thought I was going to have some time to…prepare or something. I thought she was going to be old, and happy, it was going to be like a grandparent going, or something- of course you're sad, of course you sit there next to their bed and you cry, but they got such a nice long life, and until you're gone, they're not really gone. And then it won't matter anymore." She picks at her own imaginary flaw on her skirt. "Sorry. This is really weird. You're probably totally freaked out, me just dumping all this on you."

He bounces his leg again. "I can run faster than you. So if I can't shoulder twenty or so little years after 123 of me own, I can put a Tim-sized hole in that gate over there faster than you can blink. Don't worry about me."

She smiles, and smoothes her skirt again, looking down at her hands, at her knees, at the one fresh hangnail she ripped she's not sure when.

The rain helpfully waters the closing wound.

"I'm sorry about being a jerk to you. Back in New Orleans. I was kind of…bitchier than I probably needed to be sometimes."

He scratches the back of his neck, and squints over the courtyard to the parking lot across from them. "That's all right."

"I did catch you looking at Klaus' butt a few times, though." She lifts both her eyebrows and pins him with a knowing look.

He turns red.

"And it's mine, soooo. I mean, I'd expect you to get kind of pissy if I was going around checking out Kol's butt constantly. Luckily, I know better."

"That'll disappoint him." He smiles briefly, but it looks strained, and he drops it in a moment.

"Do you want to talk about whatever happened between you two? I mean, I know we're not really bosom confidantes or whatever, but I did just wipe snot and makeup all over your coat, so I kind of owe you."

He takes out his packet of cigarettes once more, but just sits turning it in his hand, crinkling the plastic, rolling the few leftover sticks against his fingers. "No."

"Ok. But you can, if you want to."

He scratches his neck again, bobs the leg, shoves the cigarettes into his pocket and leaves his hand there where, unseen, it worries something that clicks with each clench and unclench of his fist.

"I think he's really sorry about whatever happened, if that helps."

He squints again at the parking lot, the rain plinking, plinking off his hat, and between his feet constructing a slow mirror to shine back the flushed cheeks, the steady eyes, the clean and boy-like jaw. "Not really."

A few of the raindrops have hardened, and ricochet off the pathways and the hoods of the students who dart from one doorway to another.

"You're talking to me more, now."

"Hmm?"

"That first time, when Klaus sent us to steal the armored car from the police station- you barely said two words to me."

He gives another couple of rapid clicks of whatever it is in his pocket that he's playing with. "It comes in increments. A few dozen conversations under our belts, and a bit of Guinness in me, and you'll think I've swallowed the Blarney stone."

"What's that?"

"It's a big rock out at Blarney Castle- you kiss it to get the gift of gab." He ducks his head, fires off a few even faster clicks inside his pocket, slides his eyes shyly toward her, ventures tentatively into this first gentle joke, testing the waters as he goes. "I don't think you should go near it."

She doesn't laugh, but she smiles, so he knows it's ok, she felt how carefully it was done, she isn't to think: here is one more flaw for the cons column, which stretches already to her feet.

He smiles back at her, and she sees the freckles on his nose crinkle just a little, the eyes soften at their corners, and there is just one eensy little possibility that when not lusting after her boyfriend's clearly Caroline-labeled parts, he might not be so entirely bad.

"Do you want to see where someone's changed the sign for the Grand Canal Docks to 'Grand Anal Cocks'?" he asks, with this kind of innocent eagerness that for a moment reminds her how long he must have gone, struggling from friend to friend.

"Oh my God- are you serious?" She bursts out laughing.

"It rains a lot. What else are we supposed to do?"

* * *

The hotel room is a category five disaster when they return at last, after Tim has taken her to the sign and then out for what he assures her is the best Irish stew in Dublin, which is served by a pub called the International, where they are for a solid hour entertained by the chatty bartender who minds his sluggish morning with a rag over one shoulder.

Kol has taken off (or been violently deprived of) his suit jacket, but has not yet showered out his rough evening, and sits with his socked feet on the writing table, twirling his phone in his hand.

She can hear Rebekah splashing in the bath.

"Where's that Enzo guy?" she asks, just for something to penetrate the awkwardness which has sprung up between the boys.

"He went back to his own room for a bit," Kol replies, pointedly looking at only her when he speaks, and twirling the phone so cavalierly in his hand. He leans back a little farther in his chair so they'll both see not a man but instead an icon of relaxation, which is touched by nothing, and most certainly not tall Irish boys in their dripping hats. "Bekah and I have decided we're leaving tomorrow. I'm not in the mood for any more of Nik's interference. Anyone who wants to come, can." He sets his phone against his chin and leans into it, looking at her, but you know, of course, that's not where his eyes really are.

"And where would any of us who want to come be heading?" she asks, pressing her hands together, and bringing the points of them to rest just beneath her bottom lip.

Kol slides the phone up so it rests just under his lip. "I was thinking the Middle East. I haven't been there for a good, oh, four hundred years or so. It looks like fun. Egypt, most likely. I'll take you to the Pyramids. We can spit a body right on the tip, completely confound the police."

Tim shifts his feet, she sees him pocket both hands, and hunch forward the broad shoulders, and you know before he speaks what he's going to say.

She does.

Kol doesn't.

She can tell when she looks at him: his experience has never supplanted his hope.

"Youse guys go on ahead," Tim says quietly. "I think I'll stay here, for a little while. I'll meet you later."

Kol pulls the phone from his lips, drops the hand he has tightened around it silently to his lap, shifts the socked feet, tries, so valiantly, to cover with his voice everything his face has just revealed. "Ok. Right. Well, Caroline? What about it?"

The first order of business, of course, is to return immediately to New Orleans, and kick him in his squishiest parts.

But she looks between the two of them, Tim glancing away and scratching his neck, Kol with that painfully cheerful smile on his face, and she opens her mouth, she thinks no, you see, there's this boy, I know he hurt me, but it's ok, I'm used to it, this too I will move beyond, she thinks, surely, surely, he's learning, and creeping to his eventual snail's redemption-

She says, "Yes."

* * *

 **2014, New Orleans**

His cook he has nipped from the finest institute in France, and set to work blank-eyed in his kitchen.

You can imagine, then, the smells which must waft from his house, and to the bereft tempt onward, where a man's common sense has no domain, and his stomach reigns supreme.

He had to clean up three vagrants from his front yard just last night.

Just terrible what they do to the real estate value, mate.

The dishes are brought in one course at a time by white-suited waiters who with just the right flourish wield their pepper grinders, and from the silver platters lift the monogrammed lids to magic from this simple ware the steaming lamb, the greens which stroke lazily in their oily beds, the tiny caps of the mushrooms slick with cheese.

He sips his wine.

His favorite among these smart-suited subordinates takes his place at the side of this head chair which he sits alone to stare down this vast and empty table, towel over his arm. "Sir?" he asks politely, and holds out his wrist.

Good lad.

He smiles with just the right pressure upon his dimples, so the boy feels it everywhere. "Not at the moment, Julian, thank you."

When the first heel strikes the sidewalk half a block away, ten minutes to the appointed time, he sits back in his chair, and he steeples his fingers, sharpening his eyes upon the steam.

He smells first her perfume, and then the young neck.

There is the soft tap of her fingers upon the door, the whispering of the hinges maintained to silence, that initially jarring transition of the feet from stone to wood, when the echo changes utterly, and flinches for a moment his long-suffering ears.

He does not turn around.

The heels sink once, twice, thrice into the carpet; beside him Julian straightens a little more; from the kitchen there is a bang; in the living room that old grandfather chimes his soft reminder.

She takes one more step, so she is out from his peripheral, she is before him fully, he can see now the flare of the hips beneath their belted coat, the puckering of the lapel around the bosom, the rehearsed arrangement of the long hair over her shoulders.

He turns the steepled fingers into a fist which he rests his chin upon, and smiles up at her, precisely as he handled poor Julian, knowing how the dimples cut just right the shaved cheeks, the curls hint at the cherub who must surely exist still beneath the demon, the lips of sly experience flaunt their unknown skills.

Adelaide slowly loosens the belt at her waist.

Perhaps, if he possessed this monstrous thing which turns on a man when he least expects it, the Judas heart, he might feel something which a less evolved creature might instantly realize ah, yes, here is the pinching of the conscience.

"No Caroline?" Adelaide asks, skimming the coat from her shoulders, and draping it over the back of the chair opposite him, before which lies a magnificent setting.

He does believe even fusty Elijah would approve.

"No," he says, carefully modulating his voice so she senses not his cold and lonely sheets, nor hears the twisting in his gut, and he laments once more the stage's loss.

"Interesting."

She smiles.

She takes her seat.

"Wine?" he asks, lifting an eyebrow.

"Please," she replies, and is obliged by Julian, who pours gracefully.

Her first sip is delicate; she sets the glass aside after only a moment, and leans back in her chair, draping her arm across one of its rests. "I think you've made a wise choice, Klaus."

He lounges back in his chair, and tosses a leg over one of the armrests, which Elijah would despair of, but you can never, after all, brother, appear too casual in front of one's minions, who must know, at all times, the reins have never slipped your hands, if there is a progression in their own position it is because you have chosen to advance one piece rather than another, if Shakespeare's world was only a stage, so too is yours only his board, where he puzzles out his next God-like leaps and divine campaigns.

"I always do," he tells her, smiling amicably.

She picks up the wine glass once more.

There is, apparently, no more need for propriety, she drains the glass with a brief toss of her head, Julian tips out his next elegant refill, the smooth and perfumed legs cross beneath the table, and he sees to himself how she silently eyes the walls, and discreetly judges the table, the room is wallpapered with her own personal touch, the chairs recovered in her specific preferences.

He cuts into his lamb, and discovers to his delight the center is just undercooked enough, the exterior fired perfectly right, the seasoning light, the braise deft.

Adelaide begins to choke.

She has taken her third swig of the wine, and begins now to convulse.

He watches the fingers clench upon the tablecloth, the throat heave for its failed breath, the lips gather their first rabid foam.

He takes another bite.

"It's Strychnine," he tells her casually, sipping again from his own glass. "Quite the favorite among the black widows of the 19th century. I knew many a husband who succumbed to it. There was one- ah, you don't want to hear about that." He forks up some of the greens, studies them critically, sees, yes, the cook shall live another day, the kitchen birth another masterpiece, the table bear once more its fragrant burden.

He laughs around his next bite. "What am I saying, sweetheart- of course you're interested."

Shall he start it once upon a time, as the bedside stories go?

She lurches sideways out of her chair, snagging the cloth, upsetting the dishes, making such a production of the whole thing, the blue lips, the flailing hands, fantastic, sweetheart, he gets it, but if there never was instilled in you the manners of a gentlewoman, let him oblige: It's rude to interrupt.

"So, anyway," he tells her, chewing the lamb which simply melts on his tongue, "there was a chap in Surrey, back in 1802. Beautiful wife. She might have taken a shine to yours truly." He smiles modestly. "Torrid affair, very hush hush, you, I'm sure, get the picture. Anyway, I let it slip to this young English maid that a bachelor of my particular standing might be only too happy to sweep her away to the lands of her picture books if there wasn't that slight issue of the family she already had hanging about her ankles. Terrible weight, a dusty old husband and his shrieking progeny."

Adelaide kicks the table leg, thrashing about as she is.

He rescues his wine glass before it can spill.

"Let's not be so dramatic, hmm? It might have done quite the number on her family, but it won't kill you. I expect you'll metabolize it in merely a few minutes." He samples from the mushrooms.

Adelaide retches violently, brings up nothing but a bit of wine-colored foam, her hands spasm to claws, the spine twists with a crack, now didn't that sound painful, he does hope it's nothing permanent.

Julian refills his glass.

The doorbell chimes. "Julian, get that for me, would you, there's a good lad. That must be our guest."

Another waiter appears from the kitchen as Julian vanishes, carrying his dessert, which he jovially told the cook was to be a surprise.

The torch has brought out such a nice glaze on the surface of this dish which flirts a vanilla steam beneath his nostrils.

Julian returns with the pretty little blonde he today lucked upon bar tending in the French Quarter, and clears from in front of him his emptied dishes.

"Come here, love," he tells the girl, beckoning her in with a quick little flick of his finger. "Camille, was it, sweetheart?" He shifts some of the curls on her shoulders so they lie exactly as he remembers, and smiles reassuringly at her.

"What am I doing here?" she asks, swallowing hard, and with her fear sending such a delicious waft of pheromones into the air.

"Do you see that axe, love?" He points to the tool propped innocuously in the corner of the dining room, the light catching it just right, so the eye is drawn to its newly whetted point. "Pick it up, go on. Good girl." He smiles at her. "Now, I want you to chop off her head." He gestures one-handed to Adelaide, with his other breaking the first layer of his dessert, and into the air introducing a hint of cinnamon, a suggestion of bourbon.

" _What_? I can't do that- that's horrible! Who are you? Look, we can talk about this. Look- I'm a psychologist. Whatever is bothering you- I can _help_ you."

"Of course you can, love. Julian?"

He holds up the glass.

"Turn around," he orders the trembling little psychologist, setting down the dessert fork to circle the hand not preoccupied with his wine.

He tips his head, assessing, assessing, the shape is nearly identical, the styling only slightly off, the curls tumble with nearly the same bounce, and only marginally less gloss, if he has the lights dimmed, and to his seventh glass surrenders himself, the shapes merge, the styling is superimposed, the curls beam as in a sun shaft rather than a sand squall.

Back into the dessert goes his fork. "My compliments to the chef, Julian."

"I'll be sure to let him know, sir."

"Go on, love," he encourages, delicately patting his chin with his napkin.

She lifts the axe, screaming.

Ah, well.

There's never quite anything like the original.

He does like how the blood colors those curls, though.

* * *

 **A/N: Now no one can say I'm not incorporating the show. :) I hope you all enjoyed Cami's cameo (ahahahaha). Merry Christmas, if I don't talk to you on tumblr, and see you next time!**


	3. Part Three

**A/N: I've been sitting on this update for a while because I've had a busy January, so I kind of just threw myself into writing when I could scrounge up any free time and figured I'd worry about editing and updating when I could catch my breath. The next update is actually almost finished as well.**

 **Anyway, here's a bunch of word vomit that involves Klaus being in love with the sound of his own voice. Also torture. And European jaunts. I hope you enjoy. As usual, thanks for sticking with me through this bloated mess.**

 **Klaus' yammering in this first section, btw, is directly inspired by Thomas Carlyle's 'The French Revolution: A History'. It was good enough for Dickens; it's certainly good enough for me. Also, please recall that Sophie has for some time now been locked in a room behind a specially spelled door Klaus had imported from somewhere pretentious. (Otherwise his pun will go over everyone's heads, and that would displease him. He's watching.)**

* * *

 **2014, New Orleans**

Hunger is the greatest enemy of the aristocracy.

If a government gives freely of its bread, it has chained a man for life.

For his safety and his satiety, he will with a grateful kiss of his fingers shoulder the burden of his taxes and die beneath their mass.

Thus between their balls and lemonade dreams did the court of Louis XVI eagerly ink their death warrants.

If a gambler is loose with his own purse strings, so more free is he with another's. Aristocracy, who has never bent his own back for his purse, who has made free and often with other men's toils, who lifts his goblet and folds his silks with as much ease as the peasant hefts his spade, he who does not scrabble for his coin, he who fringes his uniforms with gold, and wraps his hands in kidskin, he who, if hunger at all pricks his breast, or lies uneasy in his belly, yearns after only what he hoards already in armfuls: his power, his land, his wheat- he looks to his unbalanced ledgers, he sees his empty coffers, he thinks to himself, ah, mon dieu, and he wrings from the laboring spades another crop, and from the bent backs a final sheaf.

So you see before you the beveled carriages, the spotless opera glasses through which the delicate ballerinas, operettas, violinists are refracted. His mistress is clothed in diamonds; her son dices for not less than fifty francs.

From the Palais-Royal: an offhand promise. Your pain is felt; your pangs are not unanswered; what peasant falls down in his December rags and is lost till spring is not unmourned.

But a scrap will not douse a man's incendiary breast; you have banked him and banked him. Each of his stomach cramps, a coal. Your epaulets, another.

He watches the carriages, he catches the faint waft of the royal gardens, he sees how the children sew from ennui and not necessity; he feels those taxes which are a yoke to his family but mere paper for the sovereigns.

Every man has beneath his sheep a wolf; civility is a mask society nails over his instincts.

So you have in each winemaker a cannoneer, each farmer a sniper, you have in his tool shed an axe, perhaps a stray pistol, you have his torch and his powder, you have in his breast that star, which twinkles uncertainly, as on any overcast night.

He stokes his rage. He shares between his neighbors, his kin, his vendors this rage, which, parceled like so, is multiplied by each indignant concurrence, and returns tenfold to this original breast.

He eyes his axe, his powder, his pistol.

And up you fling his paltry coins, to rain down among the never-needy.

The epaulets gleam, the slippers whisper, in its fine glasses the lemonade brightens each happy nose, blasé already to the ladies' perfume and the gardens' own soft contributions.

But humanity gathers it swell. It will not be ignored. Palace filigree will not slow it, nor drawbridges thwart it. In all mobs there is a collective stupidity which might be mistaken for bravery. Their growth is inevitable; they collect every curious man, woman, child, who has ever felt himself crushed, who sees the torches, who hears the shouts, who remembers: last week I fought the rat for my final crust, and here is a new cake, and fine Hussars in polished boots, outfitted specially for their dance.

There is a joy in this sort of bloodletting: the mob punctures what is festering, and drains it into the streets, the children take up what shout has made itself clearest in the midst of this collective roar; the city shudders knowingly, its doors are slammed, its shutters latched, the streets echo back this army trained by hatred.

He remembers it well.

You can taste the rage of a people, and the fear of its oppressors. It is not, quite, as good as fear of him, but nearly as intoxicating.

You will oblige him, and hear the far-off sounds of musketry. You hear this far-off thunder, and slowly, the scene coalesces around you: the sweating humans, bright July overhead, the carriages bottle-necking in nearby alleys.

And himself, looking rather dapper if he says so himself, dressed in such rags to despair his eldest brother, who reclines somewhere in the Palais-Royal, calmly listening.

You smell hot flesh, yes, the singular strangeness of a man when he is shot, and has been defeated by a few metal balls, which bleed him into the street, but underneath that- the cakes, that bright lemonade, the leather boots, the Gardens are in full bloom, you sniff the fair summer breaths which are coaxed from each sturdy blossom-

Ah, now, the musketry grows closer.

Somewhere, a window shatters.

At the Bastille, Thuriot hears this approaching beehive, he hastens over the outer drawbridge which is drawn for him, you hear his pit pit patting feet, he too puts into the summer air the rankness of a man who realizes suddenly there is at his heels a whole swarm of reapers bearing their sickles-

De Launay thunders off a few discouraging rounds.

He pulls up the drawbridge.

A gun may stop a single man, but not a mob which has discovered that old adage of safety in numbers, shoulder to shoulder with so many a man, surely this is immortality, your neighbor walks on, his friend beside him, not a one has dropped, there is that increasing roar which drives so many a brigade, the pistols spit their scattered return fire, the torches are thrust high-

From the Fortress, the one great gun looses its grape shot.

On Frenchmen, ye who have rage in your hearts, who have pits in your bellies-

They never need much to get them going.

To the outer drawbridge chain scramble the men with their axes, smite, smite, for liberty, flinch not before shot or shout, down whistle the axes, the grapeshot shrieks overhead, the streets bear this warm hail stoically, the windows loudly-

You hear the crashing of the axes; a child wails; his mother shrieks; the chains creak, give their last rattling protests, the final link parts-

Down whistles the drawbridge, down the grapeshot, roar, roar, great Frenchmen, for the first layer has yielded, and triumph hangs ready for its ripe plucking-

Overhead the eight towers rise with their waiting cannon mouths. There is a ditch between mob and inner drawbridge.

But the hearts are unflagging, they have bled and broken onto the paving stones, and still rush forward the men with their axes, the pistols are reloaded, the roar continues unabated, the towers spit forth their-

"I'd rather just die than listen to this, thanks," Sophie tells him dryly, folding her hands across her chest.

He smiles as he runs the back of his hand gently along her cheek. "Don't worry, love. You will. I just thought maybe we could get to know one another a bit."

Downstairs, the front door shuts. He smells Elijah's aftershave, and with a smile he lets himself out of Sophie's cell.

"Klaus," Elijah says on his way up the stairs, stopping mid-tread, his front foot one step higher than the back. "I am curious to know, brother, why it appears that I can't leave the city?"

* * *

Kol decides to take the incredibly roundabout way to Egypt, and wants to get a ferry from Belfast and into Scotland.

He steals a car from in front of their hotel, and, for the next two hours, proceeds to fight with Rebekah about everything.

She hates his driving, his music, his singing.

He thinks she's really a poor sport, and steering with his knees, hooks up an iPod he got who the hell knows where so they can listen to the Backstreet Boys' 'Backstreet's Back' for the entire last hour of the trip.

Enzo, cramped into the backseat of this _stupid_ teeny little European car with her calls her 'Gorgeous' and winks at her until she finally snaps, "Do you have some kind of _tic_?"

Kol gets all the words wrong when he sings along.

They avoid (narrowly) three head-on collisions and run over one pedestrian while Rebekah tries to wrest the iPod away from him.

Enzo wants to know if there is anyone special in her life.

Kol honks at every car he passes, to see if he can startle them off the road.

Rebekah relinquishes control of the iPod to him at last, and begins to touch up her eye makeup in the visor mirror.

Kol sideswipes the guard rail.

Rebekah, streaked with mascara, punches him in the head.

Enzo calls her 'Gorgeous' again, in that so totally _stupid_ little drawl of his that he thinks is panty-combusting, but guess what, pal, she's taken the full brunt of the best, and didn't drop her pants for like…at _least_ a year, so pry all you want at her knees, she opens them for no smooth tongue.

Rebekah complains that she is hungry.

Kol runs over another pedestrian as a peace offering, but of course, Rebekah's too good for road kill, she wants something fresh, something that hasn't been killed secondhand, she's looking for something young, something lithe that will go down so smoothly.

They reach Belfast around noon.

Rebekah is still hungry.

Enzo holds her purse while she gets out of the car.

Kol crashes it into the ferry terminal.

There is a beat of silence.

"You guys are like the _worst_ road trip companions _ever_ , oh my _God_."

* * *

"Ah, yes. I was just recently informed it's beginning."

Elijah straightens a jacket cuff, in that infinitely patient and deadly way he has which betokens everything a blatant eye twitch or flexing of the jaw might give away in a more overt man, who wears his entire muddled mix of human experience on his sleeve beside his heart. "Well, Niklaus." He holds out his hands to either side. "Perhaps you would care to enlighten me at last, brother? I know, of course, that you've been up to something for a while. I assume this is when you draw the curtain on your creation?"

He steps down so that he is perched two treads above his brother, smiling. "The witches have sealed the city. Or at least the few blocks where most of the supernatural community congregates. More importantly: they have sealed off the section of the city in which you and I live and cannot now leave." He pauses till he feels the tension has reached its proper thickness, and leans down so his forehead is nearly touching Elijah's. "It's similar to a spell that was used to seal a tomb full of vampires in Mystic Falls, I'm told. Vampires can enter it; they cannot exit."

Elijah folds his hands in front of himself. "And you have allowed this to happen precisely why, Klaus?"

He clasps his hands behind his back, and smiles broadly now. "You've seen the recent news reports, of course?"

"To which are you referring?"

"The ones covering the travel advisories in place against New Orleans. You see locals are being urged to leave, especially the French Quarter, that the media is reporting 'gang violence' has escalated beyond the control of local authority, that even the military is having trouble containing it, and is falling back now to serve as escorts for those who are fleeing. I have a few of my men on it, putting on a bit of a show, letting the witches and their cohorts see some panic, a grabbing of children, a draining of their mothers as it slowly dawns on them: their food source is leaving, but they are not."

Elijah tips his head to the side, straightening his other cuff. "Where is the white oak stake?"

"Under my control. But not here."

His brother, of course, has grasped most of it already: never can history have claimed a slowness of wit in this first and most powerful of all families.

But still, he'd like to raise the curtain himself, Elijah, his thunder never has been stolen by anyone still of this mortal coil, if an artist has at last poured the finishing stroke from himself, it is for him to position the canvas in what light flatters it best.

He licks his lips. "They have only to wait us out, now, until slowly, creature by creature, we fall to starvation. For a little while, we can turn on one another, but you know the young ones, Elijah- they'll take it too far, kill their fellow man, eradicate their only food source, lie at last like so many cinders in the street, become, poetically, their own embalmers." There is the slow pass of the tongue once more over his mouth, which his brother follows with that subtle shifting of his eyes. "Until there are only the two oldest vampires in all creation, resisting to the last, but in the end just as trapped, just as helpless, as all the rest."

"Giving our enemies ample time to search for, and eventually discover, the only weapon which can kill us."

He sets one hand on Elijah's shoulder, gives it a firm squeeze. "Half the vampire race destroyed in one fell swoop-" He tsks and shakes his head.

"I assume you have arranged alternative food sources?"

You feel, first, a smile like this blossom inside you before ever it touches your lips.

"I've arranged alternative everything, Elijah. In the immortal words of the stage: let the show begin."

* * *

In Edinburgh, Scotland (pronounced Edin-burr- _uh_ , she finds out after Kol lets her make an ass of herself for two days) there is a series of underground tunnels where, for between ten and fifteen euro, depending on the tour company, you can stand shivering in your own childish anticipation to the scripted theatrics of long-ago murders.

Kol wants to hide in one of the tunnels and spend his day terrorizing each hapless tour group.

That, of course, translates from Kol speak to 'sow chaos and mass murder on a scale heretofore unseen since Hitler', and being yet a decent(ish) person, she flatly turns him down.

But Rebekah tells him 'no' as well, not gently, and you can see, behind the bright smile, behind the flippant wit, he's genuinely hurt, he has for days now clung to this cheerful armor, because if you hold up to the world your favorite lie, comprised of all the things people are willing to process, surely, surely, you will one day feel this lie in your bones, where all truths belong.

She looks at him sometimes, and she sees this girl who was a bitch because it was easier, because people wanted that, because all the messy and unsanded parts of you are inconvenient, and a friend, she used to think, is something you get only after you can show what's inside will never not line up with what they want to see outside.

So she sighs, and she tells him she'll go.

She tells him, no murdering, no mutilation. No compulsion, no vampire face, no sex in one of the corners while some poor wife looks on in horror at her formerly hetero husband.

And definitely no _grabbing her ass_.

He gives her this sideways smile that says, 'oh, but be honest, darling, you really didn't mind it', and sets his hand instead on her hip.

She thinks about ripping it off, but he's warm, tucked against her side, and if your skin pimples only out of habit at each whiff of Scottish spring, and the clouds devour a sun which is more ornament than necessity, still you're never not going to need this particular heat.

He's very physically affectionate.

She remembers observing that with Tim, how perhaps he's not overly effusive, but always there was some casual contact, he'd touch Tim's knuckles or lean into his shoulder, give a tug to his nape hair, sit with the knees grazing, and she notices now how he walks with his shoulder against hers, or his arm around her waist, he couches it in innuendo, he wants her to know, he's just disrespectful, he just doesn't get, and less does he care for, this personal bubble which humans establish young and rarely shed, but she knows what it means, and it makes her want to cry.

There is so much love in some people.

She used to tell herself, not in you, when no one wants it a heart is merely a hindrance, she used to tell herself, care just as much as them, she used to tell herself: your friends are absent-minded, your mother simply absent, and they will not outlast you in nonchalance.

But what you do is you touch their arms, and you hug them around the shoulders, and you're smiling every time they shrug you off, or with a distracted smile pat, dog-like, your hand, and you always think: next time it's going to hurt less, next time it's to be just a teensy little sting, and each time after that, you're going to feel it less still, you are one day going to realize you have been inoculated against their rolled eyes and their preoccupied head pats.

One thousand years in and he's still not, so she guesses there isn't and there has never been any hope for her.

So in the old city of this distant European metropolis she never expected to set foot in, she finds herself somehow holding the hand of a mass murderer who has, like any good cannibal gentlemen, handed over his coat for her to hold over her head as it begins to rain.

" _Don't_ eat anyone," she whispers to him as they wait clustered around a sign for one of the haunted tunnel tours you can find all up and down the street, because apparently every million and one tour companies is just dying to let you in on all the most sordid secrets of this city's past.

Come one, come all, see ye where the graves still bear the mark of the body snatcher's spades, and the walls which boast beneath their fresh coats the old blood of a man's slit throat!

Or whatever.

Kol smiles at her.

She gives him a look.

The old section of Edinburgh has this medieval look to it, the spires of the buildings twist skyward, the cornices (she thinks that's an architecture word) which crawl, cursive-like, over the walls give her, in the very belly, that tingly sort of delicious menace you feel upon first discovering those Gothic moors of _Wuthering Heights_ , or the eerie wailing of _Jane Eyre's_ haunted attic, beyond the walls could lurk any sort of creepy crawlie your imagination can conjure, there is, in those looming towers, a number of Draculas, at least three shuffling monsters of Frankenstein, perhaps a solitary Dementor.

The tour guide who shows at last to take their money (ok, they don't actually pay him, Kol just leans in homoerotically close and assures the man they have already handed over their euros) is either extremely enthusiastic about his city's darkest histories, or impressively talented at faking it, and leads their group of a dozen down the sidewalk and into one of the little alleys where the steps are carved from stone and the buildings pinch so closely together you can't hardly walk shoulder to shoulder.

"I like the one at the front. The girl with the curly hair," Kol whispers in her ear.

She pinches him.

He has reclaimed his coat, and wears it suavely. The rain has dampened his hair so that he can slick it back out of his eyes, and better display his best angles.

She's gotta' say, it really annoys her how hot these Mikaelsons are, and how much they know it.

"Newlyweds?" a man beside them asks amicably, smiling. He has an accent she can't place, but he doesn't stumble over the word.

"Yes," Kol answers immediately, and grabs her butt again.

She flashes her best fake smile, and jabs Kol in the ribs when the man turns away, equally amused and uncomfortable.

"If you do that one more time-"

"You're going to what, darling?" he asks, leaning in too close.

"Compel that really creepy-looking guy to hit on you." She tosses her hair.

Kol buries his face in it so he can sniff it or play with it or whatever it is exactly creepers do with a mane like this, his lips right against her ear. It reminds her of Klaus.

But she's not thinking about that jerk right now.

"Maybe he's exactly my type, darling."

"His nose is, like, three times the size of the rest of him."

Kol pulls back with a smile. "That's my shallow darling."

"Besides, I know your type. They're tall and they look like movie stars except for their really weird, 1914 old man taste in clothes."

She didn't mean for it to sting, but he gets that overly bright smile on his face again, and stops trying to sexually harass her, which is when you know he's hurting most.

She lets him eat one tourist down in the tunnels, when the guide has turned off his 'torch' and they all stand breathing nervously, waiting for the brush of that first tentative cobweb graze of the spirit who is supposed to lurk these damp halls.

All the screaming seems to cheer him up.

He takes her out for something called 'haggis' afterward, and laughs himself almost sick at whatever face she makes upon her first bite.

"What the _hell_ is this?"

"It's sausage, darling," he wheezes, leaning on the counter of the bar to steady himself, because, yeah, it's _so_ funny that she has a mouthful of _ass_.

"What's it _made_ of, you jerk?"

"Lamb organs. The casing is a sheep's stomach lining."

"Oh my _God_."

* * *

In those prehistoric times of inferior chemistry, and nonexistent forensics, poison was the royal's most choice weapon, nay, his paintbrush; murder is as fine a medium as any, after all.

You had, of course, those base and nostalgic staples: arsenic, strychnine, cyanide.

But to those appreciative of poison as not merely a tool but in fact a form, where the artist uses either his chisel, his oils, his charcoal, and each of them are as legitimate as the last, there was nothing so mundane as a bit of arsenic in a fragrant dish for these _parfumeurs_ of old.

It is rare he finds a mortal worthy of veneration, but Rene 'the Florentine' he remembers with the genuine affection and admiration a man is seldom gifted from his human colleagues, let alone a creature of his stature.

Ah, ah, love, don't look at him like that.

If there is anything so pleasing as his voice and the poetic license with which he embellishes his tales, you are free to list it.

"A nail gun. In my ear," Sophie replies in that voice long ground down with disuse.

He ignores her.

As he was saying.

A favorite of the renowned Catherine de Medici, whose venomous spree upon marriage to her French husband soon among his people fused the word _Italien_ to _empoisonneur_ so the one could not be mentioned without association of the other, Rene elevated the poisoner's handiwork as the poet embellishes his mother tongue's stale lexis.

Jeanne of Navarre's death was his favorite: who but a revolutionary would settle not for a bit of extra spice in her supper dish, but rather spice instead her gloves?

They labored over that one for quite some time. Arsenic alone will, of course, achieve the means, as any stub of pencil wielded by the shakiest of hands.

But men of genius do not content themselves with merely the result; they are interested in the process; they aim to beautify the end. Not for them the base watercolor which captures, accurately enough, the summer field.

You can, they discovered after some experimentation, feed a poison to toads and those other small creatures which, not furry or attractive enough to stir men's consciences, are forever sacrificed for civilization's expanding intellect. Upon death, the bodily fluids are then distilled from these earliest of lab rats, which yield not just the original poison, but also that byproduct of decomposition, hydrogen sulfide.

Alas, this was, in his humble opinion, Rene's creative apex. Every master has his magnum opus, and all the disappointments which follow.

He did, you'll be grateful to know, retire the poor man before his former brilliance could be eclipsed by his present mediocrity.

For a good year, he amused himself in thinning the royal herd, who responded with the blind paranoia typical of the breed, and proceeded to murder anyone who could be made to fit that elusive shadow of the anonymous suspect.

This was long prior to the days of electricity, of course, so by candlelight he hunched over his laboratory, sharing between beakers various substances, and noting in his journals the effects of each herb, chemical, combination upon the victims who on his couch expired in a contortion of agony, foam on their lips, hell in their eyes.

Kol, forever in search of his next substance to abuse, occasionally played the willing guinea pig.

He once-

He once, in the midst of some herbal hallucination said to him, Nik, I love you, just as sincerely as a boy who lived once upon a very long time ago.

Sophie blinks up at him.

He rubs one of his hands nervously over the other.

"Least of all," he says, and his voice cracks, but this woman is only a very fresh corpse, who will in a handful of days matter just as much as she did before she linked her life to Caroline's. "Least of all did he deserve what I've turned into."

* * *

Europe's social system being what it is, most of those reduced to the streets are there, if not precisely by choice, at the behest of whatever drug has gripped them by the 'short and curlies', and are either themselves in possession of something which will momentarily trick him into bliss, or can direct him toward the dealer who carries only the best and strongest vices.

He has, to his great disappointment, discovered that, sans Tim, or rather the unknown of him, the promise, somewhere out there is a man I love, somewhere, somehow, we're going to cross our paths, etc. etc., he is like any stupid nineteen-year-old who has for the first time broken his new and shiny heart.

Love is a fib of poets who are employed solely by their aptitude for embellishing every little patter of a man's heart, Nik told him once. We are above that, little brother.

He smiled, of course.

But oh, Nik, he thought. It's just you who's above it. And he can never give up on it, because once you weren't.

He handles his grief about as well as can be expected, by injecting, snorting, and smoking enough substances to kill ten men, and for good measure ensuring, thanks to your friendly neighborhood Scottish bartender, that he is comprised of approximately ¾ whiskey and rum.

He throws up on one sexual partner, overdoses in the middle of a church service, wakes up in any number of alleys, and once, rather famously (read all about it on tumblr, darlings!) is arrested for public indecency in the graveyard where he's told someone named JK Rowling espied on one of the headstones the name of her most famous villain.

The arresting officers are found, hours later, brutally murdered in their squad car; of the handsome perpetrator, nothing is known.

Quite the mystery for the ages.

Caroline finds him one night in a courtyard which is home to mostly private residences whose terraces overlook the plain little square.

He has entirely given up trying not to be pathetic, and is sitting with his back against the wall of some writer's museum, aggressively drinking his fourth bottle of vodka.

She sits down next to him.

The moon is bright tonight, unencumbered by any clouds. She has on, for show, a smart coat which a human would need to keep out what is a brisk night, as most Scottish ones are.

"You're going to see him later."

He takes another drink, rubs his bloodshot eyes. He is still a little high, having a mere half hour ago shot himself up with as much heroin as his enhanced metabolism can stand, but is right now most decidedly wallowing in the 'down' portion of addiction.

"No, I'm not. What he meant by 'I'll meet up with you later' was 'goodbye'. He was just too nice to say it."

Caroline pulls the flaps of her coat over each leg, and tilts her head back against the museum. "Ok, well, you can wallow as much as you need to, but I'm pretty sure you're going to see him again. And then you're going to think, 'Wow, that Caroline doesn't just have super great hair, she's also a genius'."

He takes another drink. "And what makes you think that, darling?"

"Can't I just believe in love?"

He tips the bottle once more against his lips. The vodka has ceased to burn, and now just uncomfortably swells his belly. He imagines walking is going to resemble water bed sex. "You mean like you and Nik?" he asks, and then he decides, that's something Nik would say, that's precisely how Nik would lash out, into whichever part is still raw and oozing, and he offers, quite magnanimously, he thinks, to sleep with her by way of apology.

She rolls her eyes at him.

"It would be the best apology you've ever received, darling, I assure you."

"Why don't you just stop, instead?" she asks. "Why don't you stop hitting on me and making sure, by way of innuendo, that I can pretend everything is ok, and not have to dig any deeper, and just tell me how you actually feel right now?"

He feels that telltale burning in his eyes, the tightness in his throat, and scrunches up his nose to stave it off. "I can't."

"Why not? You probably know every word in the English language."

He scrunches up his nose again. "Because I'd have to just scream."

She clasps her hands between her knees, and shifts against him. "That's ok. Do it. I'll even tell anyone who comes to see what the hell is going on that it was me. Because you are a steel-abbed god of twelve inch penis-y goodness and I am helpless in your thrall. Or something like that." She smiles.

He rolls his head against the wall so that he's looking her eye to eye, so that he can see, in the moonlight, the darker flecks in her blue eyes, and the cosmetic-enhanced length of her lashes, the little pencil thin eyebrows she must have labored over for hours, so that not even a stray hair escapes her totalitarian control.

He leans forward just a little; they are nearly nose to nose anyway.

It's not meant sexually; he does not intend to stir either of them.

She brushes the hair out of his eyes when he kisses her, so perhaps she understands, some intimacies are not meant for romance, or sex, sometimes you just need the warm press of another forehead against your own, sometimes you just need to know, there's no ulterior motive of sexual climax, romantic liaison, simply: you wanted to see, are you worthy of touch, just because?

"I deserve to be sad."

There.

That's his confession.

* * *

To wait is a general's harshest nightmare.

But in all war, each side must gather his breath for the greatest charge.

The Great War, known more commonly to history's texts as World War One, he tells Sophie, was where he netted the biggest portion of his letter collection, which one can view in the west wing of the house.

If, of course, one is not engaged in (you might even say _enchanted_ with) other concerns.

Pause for laughter, etc. etc.

That reminds him- did he tell you of the time he and an old friend of his invented the modern day notion of stand-up comedy, in a little 1920s speakeasy where the audience was slow to be sure, as most humans are, but appreciative enough once he explained that laughter is a balm to any nervous young showman, and the savior of your head?

Anyway, the Great War.

There was, during this period, an outpouring of love which harried the censors, bogged down the postmen, provided for those men dying in their trenches the only reason to grimly fix bayonets, and stumble on through the mud.

A man will not die for his hatred. He will kill for it, certainly, but to lay down his life he must have something more than an anonymous helmet which his government tells him is the enemy. To a British child who has barely glimpsed his shaving mirror before marching off to France, a German is merely a target board; and the German is similarly wary of dying for this British bullseye.

But if you instead tell him if you fail, this man will rape your sweetheart, he will kill your sister, he will sleep in your childhood bed, and raze your childhood town, you have personalized him; you have created a narrative. The German is no longer a target board; the Brit not merely a bullseye.

Now the German is keeping him from the mother who sends him care packages of warm socks and little notes about his sickly brother's rallying health; the British child eyes the wife who pens the German those aching missives which the lovestruck sender cuts a vein for.

A man _will_ die for his love. Painfully, slowly, and not gloriously, if need be.

Most of those eleven million souls died with these reminders squashed flat against the breast killed by a shell's fatal stroke. He used to collect them, afterward, those which were still comprehensible, anyway, and not riddled to illegibility.

His youngest brother was at the time already a good year into his first and only daggering. His wild streak having led to many a near brush with dear old Father, Kol was, of course, deserving of far more than this one and only punishment, but then, though you'd hardly know it by this point, he'd never lost his lingering soft spot for the youngest and most rash of them all. He was himself over 900, and barely distinguishable as having once been a man.

But in first the English and then the German trenches, he wrote to his dead brother letters which in verbosity and floridness surely matched any breathless lover.

He kept them all.

There are, in total, 127 of them.

He thought one day when Kol was ready to forgive him, he might hand them off to his brother so he could see, in the precise clarity which only war brings, how sorely he was missed.

They are, in fact, buried in the cellar of one of his French manors, in a collection of cigar boxes gifted to him by a particularly ardent 18th century admirer.

He cannot, genuinely, recall exactly which manor.

He knew, he supposes, with that clairvoyance of someone who has under his belt his years of experience, that there would come this day, when he pushed his brother too far, and no amount of having, 100 years ago, emptied himself all over a page will prove that he is indeed, truly, sorry.

* * *

She's in a bar in Budapest when she gets a text.

She always flinches just a little when she receives one; she has not tried, since Dublin, when she fired off a hasty 'u ASSHOLE', to contact Klaus.

He's too cowardly to contact her now, he'll show up when she least expects it, close enough to smell her hair, looking creepily like a ruffled puppy she has banished to its punishment corner, bearing something shiny, he won't exactly say sorry, but she'll know, down to her tiptoes, that he's missed her, that he probably slept with a Caroline hair doll every night, he wrote really bad poetry to the 'dripping hole she's left in his black soul', he's here because he just wants to put his forehead against hers, and lean into her like one thousand years, and still he's not sure, what is it, to stand without her.

He loves her.

She gets that.

She doesn't understand half of what he does, or why he does it, she doesn't understand, how could he have just let her _go_ when she was supposed to be the only thing he ever wanted, but he anime loves her, little stylized hearts around his head and everything.

But she's not yet ready to talk to him.

She's dancing with Kol and Enzo at the front of the bar where the music is loudest, and there is the charred waft of the BBQ at the back of the room, and that bright apple scent of the hookah smoke that makes her feel just a little heady, so with a quick, "I'm going to go find Rebekah; she was supposed to be back with my cocktail like an _hour_ ago" to them both, she slips through the crowd, back toward the ladies' bathroom with the carved wooden mermaid on its door, where she spotted an empty table.

" _Mine_ ," she snaps at the guy who tries to take it, and hops up onto one of the stools.

She sits for a moment feeling the heart pulse nervously in her throat, and flips open her phone.

It's from a number she doesn't recognize.

It says: **Your mother has a kind and loving daughter. That's what she sees.**

She can feel how soft the smile on her face is.

She wonders how long it took him to compose it, and how much longer it took him to get over enough of his shyness to send it.

She sneaks a glance back toward Kol, who is dancing super gay with Enzo, because of course he's still trying to get in his pants, but she can tell he's only, like, maybe 60% committed to coaxing Enzo into one of the corners where they can make out. You can tell when he's really serious about bedding someone, and when he's just putting out his general 'available to sleep with anything attractive' feelers.

She saves the number in her phone, and slips it back into her pocket just as Kol suddenly pops up at her shoulder, almost startling her right off the stool.

"Rebekah? Are you here?" he calls under the table, ducking down to look.

She kicks, not seriously, in his direction.

He grabs both her knees so he can steady the stool, and stands between them, blasting beer fumes into her face as he leans in to tuck one of her curls behind her ear.

He's got 'drunk enough to bang anything' all over his face, so she nudges the stool just slightly back before he can start slobbing on her neck or something, which would be a little awkward, because she's really starting to like him, and she'd hate to have to stab him in the eye with her lip liner.

"Rebekah's upstairs necking with some boy," he tells her. "I tried to join in, but she's not in a sharing mood." He wiggles his eyebrows at her. "What about you? Do you want to make out? Just as friends, darling."

"No." She pokes him in the chest with her finger. "But since Rebekah's obviously never bringing me my cocktail, why don't you go get it for me?"

He smiles at her, and she feels a little bad for Tim, who probably never had a chance. "What do you want?"

She's never had a Mikaelson acquiesce so easily to her before, so she eyes him for a solid suspicious minute before she tells him, "Surprise me."

Twenty minutes later, he is still not back with her drink.

She huffs and goes looking for him.

He is one of the darker corners, hardcore eating some guy's face off, holding her cocktail safely out to one side, and with his free hand groping the guy's ass.

" _Kol_."

The guy gets unceremoniously shoved aside, hard enough that he slams his shoulder into the wall.

There follows a stream of angry-sounding language she does not understand.

Kol cracks his neck, and licks his lips.

He smiles, and pats the guy on his cheek, and now, gripping the guy by his bearded jaw, he says, "Too much tongue, darling", and rips it out of his face.

" _Kol_ ," she hisses, watching wide-eyed as the guy drops to both his knees and tries, with his now dumb mouth, to wail his incomprehensible agony.

He throws his arm around her shoulders, and hands her the drink. "There are drugs in that. Drink it if you want. Make up your mind quickly, darling. I took some pills I didn't recognize, and now I need to destroy something."

"Like that guy's _tongue_?"

"No; something bigger. Something they'll put my name in lights for." He screams, " _Whoo_!" right in her ear, and, snatching back the cocktail glass, drains it himself. "Dithered for too long, darling," he says, tapping her nose with his pointer finger.

She doesn't know what he took, but he can barely stand up, and there's that jittery, maniac sort of hum in him which she assumes probably presages a spree killing in the middle of this bar if she doesn't remove him from it.

They stumble out onto the sidewalk.

She loses him about three seconds later.

She sighs, and follows the police sirens.

* * *

Of Romania he does not remember much, except this birthplace of Dracula's myth is tackily proud of Stoker's creation, and with cheap plastic souvenirs plies at every corner their claim to literary fame.

He does recall sneaking selfies in one of Sighisoara's restaurants (Casa Dracula, he believes is the truly inspired name), and stopping himself just in time from sending them off to Tim, who just a week or so before their falling-out was in the midst of some sort of awful homoerotic vampire novel, and would appreciate the pose he struck with the restaurant's Dracula bust.

Caroline babbles excitedly that Romania is the birthplace of something called a Sebastian Stan, and wonders if they will run into him.

He Google images a Sebastian Stan, and promptly asks Caroline if he is gay.

"I don't think so," she tells him.

"Have him here in twenty minutes; I can change that."

"I'm not your Grindr account! Get him here yourself!"

He sends a drunken e-mail to IMDB with an attached cock picture; he assumes management will contact the proper people.

His partners blur; he suspects, with the addition of that one particular orgy, they number something close to thirty in the four days they linger in Bucharest.

Tim, his God love him, only looks like an angel, and is in fact just as whoreish; he's probably fucked just as many in the time they've been apart, he tells Caroline as she cleans up one of his latest binges from the floor of his hotel room. More, even.

"I doubt that," she says, wrinkling her nose as she picks up something neither of them can identify, and flings it into the rubbish bin.

"Don't slut shame me. I know my rights as a 21st century man of fluid sexual orientation."

"I'm not slut shaming you, I'm just tired of cleaning it up. Also, stop reading tumblr."

"I had a lot of cocaine last night," he says, running his hands over his face, and then flinging them back down into the rumpled sheets. "I may have called him while I was high. I'm not going to tell you how embarrassing the voicemail I left was; it would ruin your admiration for me."

She props a hand on one of her hips. "One, you are the worst at breaking up. Two, yesterday night, I helped you rinse vomit out of your hair because you were so drunk you couldn't actually get into the shower yourself. Which, by the way, how much alcohol do _you_ actually have to drink to get that screwed up? Anyway, my point is, one weepy voicemail to your ex-boyfriend is not going to suddenly shatter the pedestal which I haven't, in case you were wondering, actually put you on. And three, could you please pull up the covers or close your legs or something? I'm tired of looking at your penis."

He runs his hands back through his hair, and leaves them there. "Just relax and feast your eyes, darling."

"Ok, except I hate to break this to you, but every non-erect penis, even yours, is just kind of pathetic-looking. It's like a sad sea creature. It's like whoever put humans together was like, oh hey, I have this extra part, eh, I'll just stick it here."

He pauses for a moment, sifting his hands through his bangs which are sticky with whatever he fell asleep in, and leave something particularly unappetizing-looking on his fingers. "Do you think he pictures me whenever he's fucking someone?"

"Kol. _Penis_. And also, _boundaries_. It's kinda' not really my place to wonder what Tim is doing while he's having sex."

"He wouldn't mind."

She throws his trousers at him. "Would you please put on your pants? I'll take you out to breakfast."

* * *

When Kol is not looking, she sneaks subtle updates to that number which she has stored under the name 'Gay Tim', because she doesn't actually know his last name, and there is already a Tim in her phone.

 **zagreb croatia is gr8! have seen so many interesting things from our hotel at Ul. kneza Borne 2, 10000 and this one club the bp club at Ul. Nikole Tesle 7, 10000 where we've been hanging out every night!**

 **beaches are so beautiful in varna bulgaria! the hotel where we're staying is my favorite so far! it's the hotel dolce vita at Golden Sands Bulgaria, 9007**

 **prague is amazing. astrological clock was a disappointment, but the prague marriott at V Celnici 1028/8, 110 00 Praha is rly pretty**

She only refrains from sending one, which she typed out in a burst of frustration after Kol puked all over her favorite shoes, and fell asleep naked in _her_ bed with this girl who smelled so overwhelmingly of cigarettes the maids will have to just trash every sheet:

 **u don't have to forgive him but pls just text your boyfriend or something and tell him this isn't forever because i can't kill him and also i can't deal with this for the rest of my undead life he just PUKED on my FAVORITE SHOES and he smells like a train station stairwell actually i think that's the girl he is right now doing in MY bed but either way i'm to that rly ugly neck-wringing level of DONE and he's a gajillion years old and could just break my stranglehold with his pinkie and I NEED YOU TO SAVE ME but most notably my EYES because do you know what i have seen this past week**

Ok, so that's so totally not her place, she understands, and deletes the draft.

She tries again.

 **come and get him or i swear i will end him**

She waits until he is sober enough to look sad again, and she sighs, and fires off a, **bucharest (that's in romania) is rly cheesily over the top into dracula which i guess is because the guy who inspired bram stoker was born here which u probably know since ur rly old but anyway truth is i think it's kind of cute and the hotel where we are staying is the hotel carpati str. matei millo 16**

* * *

She's received just the one lone text in Budapest, but still she faithfully marks their progress:

 **u should see macedonia it's so beautiful went to a church yesterday overlooking this gorgeous lake. we r staying in skopje at the hotel pelister plostad makedonija**

 **tirana albania right now haven't seen much we are just getting settled into the brilant antik at Rr jeronim de rada. we r leaving for egypt soon**

* * *

She takes lots of pictures of herself and Kol with her phone, which isn't suspicious at all, because he is the biggest camera whore she has ever known and regularly photo bombs every poor family, couple, solo traveler they meet, and these too she sends off, with helpfully noted addresses and landmarks.

* * *

 **thank u for ur message. srsly. u don't have to respond to this. i just wanted u to know it meant a lot to me.** **i hope u r safe,** she texts him from Greece.

* * *

She tries to sneak a picture of Kol sleeping on one of Crete's beaches with his shirt off, all damp with the sun, because if there's anything she learned from her dad, whose innocently labeled 'business files' computer folder is something she can never unsee, gay guys like sweaty man boobs, but of course he instantly snaps awake, and smirks just like his stupid jerkface brother.

"I knew I was going to catch you leering at me one day."

"I was _not_ -"

"Taking pictures of me while I was vulnerable, unconscious, and half-naked?"

She crosses her arms. "I don't think 'vulnerable' is really the right word for a guy who just yesterday _ate_ a _baby_."

"Don't be over-dramatic, darling. It was a toddler. And his mother _asked_ me to watch him for a moment. She didn't specify what I could or couldn't do with him." He stands up, brushing sand from his abs. "How many other pictures do you have of me?"

"Absolutely zero," she lies, slipping the phone into the beach bag she has slung over her shoulder. "By the way, where are Rebekah and Enzo?"

"Elsewhere. Try and be a little more subtle at changing the subject, darling." He cocks his head at her. "Why are you taking pictures of me?"

She fiddles with the strap on her bag. "I'm…a pervert."

"What?"

Ok, so, when these two are back together, and they're wearing those agitatedly cutsey couples' shirts that match and everything, they better be sporting _giant_ freaking pictures of one Caroline Forbes, patron saint of murderous man love.

"I like to…take pictures of guys when they're asleep. And they can't do anything about it. I don't know. I guess it makes me feel strong or something. I'm a real deviant. I do it to Enzo too."

"Really?" he asks, quirking one of his eyebrows at her. "You better let me see those ones," he tells her, and suddenly grabs her around the waist.

She shrieks as he lifts her, kicking out with both feet, and in one supernatural surge heaving the shoulder bag out away from her, down the beach where he cannot reach it, just at the strip where the first tentative waves touch the sand.

He hoists her over his shoulder.

"Hey! _Hey_! Put me down!"

He bounces her a few times instead, cinching his forearm tightly over the backs of her thighs, just under her bikini bottoms.

"Do _not_ molest me."

He pokes her ribs just below her armpit; she screams. "Don't tickle me either, oh my God, _stop_ -"

"Shh, darling, you're causing a scene."

"Oh, right, _you're_ concerned about that," she says, trying not to laugh as she attempts, with the incredible awkwardness of her position, to pry his arm off her thighs.

He can keep her in place with his superior strength, but there are too many eyes for him to use his better reflexes, and so when he bends down to pick up the bag, she slips off his shoulder when he loosens his arm, and, snatching the bag out from underneath him, takes off sprinting up the beach with it in both hands.

"No, _wait_ -" she screams a second before he tackles her.

The sand geysers around them.

She hears him spit some out of his mouth, wriggles her way forward, the sand burns her belly, his sun-warmed hands grasp her by the ankles, she is yanked back just as she reclaims the strap of the bag.

He rolls her over, and straddling her thighs, plucks the bag easily out of her hands.

"Don't look at that-" she yells, more sharply than she intended, and fists both her hands beneath her chin, biting her bottom lip as he digs out the phone and, not looking at her, taps a couple of times at the screen.

"Don't text him again, Caroline," he says quietly, and tosses the phone back to her.

He has deleted Tim's number from her phone, she finds when she at last looks down at it.

But she memorized the number, and has only ever been good at giving rather than receiving orders.

* * *

' **Dracula' is a shite book. 'Frankenstein' is much better** , she sees upon first unlocking her phone the morning before they leave for Cairo. And, just beneath it:

 **And you can ask his Royal Arseholeness what kind of stunted eejit leaves a thirty minute voicemail on a man's phone.**

* * *

 **2014, New Orleans**

There is a witch from Haiti with whom Kol was on quite good terms back in the 1840s, and who is happy to assist him when he contacts her.

He trusts exactly none of the New Orleans witches to not attempt something underhanded during the unlinking spell, and has this old friend flown in to handle the rather delicate procedure.

"Klaus. Having some trouble?" she asks when he opens the front door to greet her with a kiss on either cheek.

He smiles. "Nothing I haven't got completely under control. And how is the 21st century treating you, sweetheart?"

Afterward, he escorts her back to the front door and helps her on with the coat she fails to don with her shaking hands, poor love. Takes so much more out of her than it used to.

"I don't think it needs to be said that I'd rather this little rendezvous remain just between us girls. Something I'm working on necessitates that I keep a low profile at the moment."

She cups both his cheeks for just a moment in her wrinkled old hands, patting him with maternal tenderness. "You don't have to worry about me saying anything, Klaus."

"I know," he replies, and snaps her neck.

* * *

He likes to draw out his tread on the steps so that each stair creaks warningly, the hand sweeps noisily along the banister, the grandfather clock coincides with each advancing foot.

Sophie is sitting on her bed looking up at him when he touches the door with just the tips of his fingers, so gently, so that it might swing inch by arduous inch wide enough to materialize him, magician like, before her eyes.

"You're still here."

She leans forward to clasp her hands between her knees; he listens to the slow shush of her thumb over her knuckles. "What's the point? If I run, you're just going to catch me."

He links his hands behind his back, and smiles. "Do it anyway, love. I like the chase."

* * *

Sophie is caught two days later, hiding in an attic a couple of blocks over, he's told, and brought to his front lawn.

She does, contrary to what that pasty passivity in her room might have portended, put up quite the fight, twisting and kicking out and with all of her straining against the hold two of his older minions have clasped round her shoulders and her sides.

What a picture she makes; he'd do well to store the image away and use it later for a line study.

He sits with his coffee in the porch swing Caroline spent many an evening lounging on, and rests his ankle on top of his other knee.

He has her impaled in the fashion of Vlad the Impaler, who if somewhat insufferable at least knew how to strike fear into one's enemies, and as she screams and sobs over this intrusion, her belly is slit open, and the steaming innards pulled out through the ruined t-shirt.

He sips his coffee.

* * *

He tries, with his charcoal, to capture the elusive glow of those curls, the precise curve of the mouth, the smooth valleys of the knuckles which once he was privileged to touch.

He sleeps, or rather he does not sleep, on her side of the bed.

What mystery has man not solved in his own ceiling; what contemplation has not blindly leapt its traces, and hurtled madly beyond his reach; in all the universe, what riddle cannot be answered, and which atom might not be dissected down to the bone, and its science advanced by eons?

But his brother, ah, his brother, to whom he was once the sun, and the girl whose hair he has still not washed from his pillows.

In 127 letters, can he truly have stripped raw what it is to be a brother, to love when one is no longer a man, and beholden to none of his frailties, can he have truly said, Kol, if the heart has been somehow preserved, it is embalmed by what family has loved him and not left him, if it yet beats at all, yearns at all, brother, it is you who have massaged the last failing throbs from it-

If he was not struck dumb by it, and resurrected in a blind panic, if a smile could not still crush him, nor the sleeping head rear in his memories those tangled strands of old, before the beard appeared in its first patchy infancy-

He does not understand, brother, how does he say, I am humbled before it, frightened of it, love has never made of itself an ally but rather an enemy, if he has punished in the face of it, it is because he has suffered in the throes of it-

He shuts his eyes.

He presses his face to where Caroline once slept and will perhaps forever leave cold; he presses close to his breast, in the shirt pocket where an infantryman stores his sweetheart, the picture of his brother from 1909, and looks at the smile when there is no one to catch him at it; he shades out the curls, and strokes his pencil along the knuckles.

* * *

He rations the humans he has stored in attics and bars round the French Quarter, and for the benefit of those watching, makes a few of those sacrifices which all great generals must suffer.

Elijah watches a few of his subordinates fight one another in the streets, tearing at one another's throats, setting upon one another in that instinctual panic of the stampede, leaving in their wake the bodies of those which were not efficient enough for him to keep.

"How long must this charade last, Niklaus?"

"Until they have sufficient reason to believe we all lie molding away in our starvation."

Elijah sips from the glass of blood he delicately holds between forefinger and middle, and sighs. "I know. It was a rhetorical question, brother. I just find it somewhat weary." He takes another sip. "Is that a chariot in our backyard?"

"Just a little something I thought up to keep idle hands busy." He smiles.

Elijah glances back at him, the window not now being sufficient for his attention; there are only a few stragglers left, biting ineffectually at one another. "Dare I ask?"

"Oh, I imagine you won't have much longer to wait and see, brother."

* * *

That Camille girl proves rather amusing.

She thinks, she informs him one afternoon, that he could benefit from some intensive therapy sessions.

He sits back from the dinner she has interrupted, swirling the wine in his glass. "Excuse me?"

"I'm a therapist; I can help you. I know-" Her voice wavers a little. "I know what I saw, what you made me do- that's not you."

A laugh would not at this moment be unwarranted, but he considers for a moment, biting back his mirth; let's see where she takes it, hmm?

"It isn't, is it? Pray tell, what gives you that impression?"

"I've seen men like you before. I've known men like you. What you're doing- you're crying out for _help_. Don't you see that?"

He swirls the wine once more, and with a great effort stifles his laughter. "I understand the mind's a bit muggy at the moment, what with the compulsion and all, but you do realize what I am, sweetheart, don't you?"

What soft doe eyes she makes at him; he wonders what sort of appetizer they might best be served alongside. "I understand you have, like anyone who can be saved, a lot of demons, that you're struggling to control them, that you _want_ to control them. You just need the right tools."

He licks his lips. "Therapy. Talking at a piece of paper which was quite obviously wasted on you, love, is to be my savior."

That seems to fly right over her head. "It can be. If you're willing to just try. You'll never know, will you, if you don't do that?"

* * *

And so he lies on his own couch, while in a vast leather chair she makes those delightful little appetizer eyes at him and asks him such marvels as: "What was your childhood like", and his personal favorite, "But how does that make _you_ feel", as if a thousand years of life and he has never contemplated, and least of all shaped himself, those molds of past and present which form a man for his future.

He throws one arm dramatically over his eyes, and he moans something about all the blood on his hands, the men who have fallen before him, the villages he has routed, the children he has murdered, he tells her: he has tried to control it.

But of what use is resistance to a man like him, for whom too much time has passed, and too many deaths befallen, when he has done aught but slake his thirst, and revel in his vices, and she tells him, so _earnestly_ , she tells him-

Here, look, he can hardly get it out, as oft as he has noted it before, truly here is where he distinguishes himself a master player, suppressing his laughter as he does, and firmly in place keeping his look of wounded penitence-

"People are _made_ to be bad by their circumstances, Klaus. They are not born that way. And somewhere inside of them, they still want to be _good_. You regret everything you've done- I can tell. That's a _good_ thing. It means you can be saved."

He puts a crack in his voice. "But what does that even mean, to be saved?" he whispers.

"It is not nice to play with your food, Niklaus," Elijah says as he passes into the study, and stands browsing one of the bookcases.

"Do you mind, Lijah? We're having a session."

Camille leans forward to touch his hand, and give him a warm smile. "If Klaus doesn't mind, it might be helpful for you to sit in, Elijah. I could use your perspective on Klaus. On what he's feeling."

Elijah blinks. "You wish to…rehabilitate him?"

"With a lot of time and therapy, I think it's possible, yes."

" _Niklaus_? You're going to cure Klaus of himself by…talking to him?" He turns with a frown, book in his hand. "Did you compel her to say this, brother?"

"No," he replies, sitting up. "She's just naturally this funny, Elijah."

He taps the spine of the book absently on his hand, and cocks his head at Camille, who looks somewhat confused, but has held onto her soft smile. "Humans certainly are devolving, aren't they, brother?"

Elijah slips out of the room.

He applies his best dimples to Camille, and lies back on the couch.

* * *

Tim, he is informed, has indeed split from the group and remains in Ireland; he is the architect of several IRA assassinations, which have seen a sudden and alarming surge in the past couple of weeks.

Kol, Bekah, Caroline, and this Enzo man were briefly lost in Macedonia, and have resurfaced in Cairo.

Kol has started a firefight between some Egyptian drug dealers, and was last spotted leading police a merry chase down one of Cairo's numerous motorways.

Caroline is safe.

He replays that once, twice, thrice in his head: Caroline is safe.

* * *

"And then, when I was five," he moans on to Camille, who diligently notes each of his exaggeratedly miserable expressions in her notebook, and with gentle fingers touches his 'foul demon hands' which are, according to her, stained rather in the hope of his future than the blood of his past, whatever the bloody hell that is supposed to mean.

She is quite alarmingly stupid for a woman of her supposed education.

Thank your God for those small favors of sculpted cheekbones and pretty lips, hmm, sweetheart?

* * *

You can stop monitoring Tim, he orders upon his next update.

You can…let him go, he says, and stands for a long moment afterward, holding his phone to his ear, his eyes shut.

It is for…it is for his brother to decide whom he will love, and whether he has any left to spare for his elder brother who will be either pardoned or condemned by the caprice of someone else's feelings.

"Have him shot, though," he says. "Just as a little parting gift. Don't use anything permanent. Just shoot him somewhere painful. Perhaps a couple of times. One to either knee- he hates that."

* * *

He has Sophie's head mounted on a plaque, and is putting the finishing touches on the hair when Camille enters the study for their latest session.

"I can't decide, love- do you think my redemption would look better right above the bookcase there, or on the opposite wall? It's quite blank; I'm tired of that empty space."

She rushes to the corner to vomit.

* * *

The French Quarter has begun to acquire that eerie silence which one could once find in the trenches of France, after a bombardment, when the keening injured were carried off to either salvation or peace by the merciful pistol or the valiant stretcher boy.

He makes sure to scatter this sealed-away corner of the city with the desiccated corpses of the men and women who can be spared, and to carefully secrete those who cannot in the houses around him, where they will quietly await his orders.

* * *

 **2014, London**

Liam Mcallister is movie handsome, with the jaw of that Hemsworth fella's in all the pictures these days, and the slick of the black hair smoothed back out of his eyes, and he never lets himself forget it.

He keeps up a stream of chatter you wouldn't believe from a lone man, and in the window of the subway car anxiously checks to make sure the handsome's not been rattled off him, three, four, oh, five times he looks into the dirty window, to fuss with the eyebrow, or smooth down the hair a little more, you could set your watch by him: first the machine gun of the exclamations over weather, politics, his Aunt Siobhán with the three cats, and the pub in Belfast from which he once, did he tell you, found himself escorted arse first, on account of being too popular with the wans, and then up flickers the hand once more, the lips flash their rehearsal seduction, the eyes smolder those coded messages slipped between lover and loved.

You can tell he's never killed a man before, he's so eager for it.

"Them fookin' Limeys," Liam says, leading the way out of the tube station, his hood up, as London has decided at this moment to deliver on what promise her clouds have been hinting at all day, and he gets a gust of stingers right to his face that'd make any shite Irish day new da proud.

They are near as accustomed to it as himself, the locals, though you can see a few of the tourists scrambling for the nearby coffee shops, or frantically putting up their umbrellas, but sure, what kind of revolutionary would he be, turn his nose up at a bit of sprinkle and shelter like a babe in that coffee scented bosom of the nearby cafes, no, he flips his collar like a _man_ , and lets Mother Nature give him a good dashing.

Looks like that Cillian Murphy lad, the one in that show- now there's a man knows how to strut, you can tell he means business, a coat flap like that, the cap tilted just so, and the cigarette trailing its mist which even the smokestacks of Birmingham dare not confront.

The rain puts out his fag.

He flicks it, disgustedly, into a puddle.

"Have a care to your pistol, lad," he hisses at Liam. "You've got the whole fuckin' handle sticking out."

Liam nudges it back into the pocket of his hoodie.

Christ. Teach him to pick his partner based on the merits of his ass rather than the virtues of his head.

You can smell the fresh grit being worked free of the bricks, and that thin broth of oil and old paint which rises always to float on the epidermis of the street. The café doors blast here a whiff of coffee; there, the off-key performances of one of the bawdier burlesque clubs. His fangs, untouched in a solid twenty-four hours, because he was last night busy acting the jackass in a hotel room with a bottle of whiskey and Kol's voicemail, slide free their aching tips, so they might be brushed by this wind that bears all those warm throats with the blood fresh as a young rose in them, taste like the first spring lambs, he can tell, and fixes his collar again.

It was starting to wilt.

His hat shoots a steady stream of this violent downpour out away from him, saving his bangs, and misting the eyelashes.

London jostles him at the elbow and tramples on his toes and if there is in any of these bumps and hip chucks an "excusing meself", he doesn't hear it.

The red double deckers rush past with their whirlwind of flash lightning the tourists shutter on, off, on off, clicking away at their memories, freezing in these brief eternities the flare of his coat, and the hat tipped down into his eyes, which he was just lucky to present in exactly the smartest way possible, like a real classy bastard, to whom his best angles come flawlessly.

"Go into that café and order something," he tells Liam, jerking his head at one of the shops they have just passed. "We can see the flat from here. Ought to have a couple of hours before they show. I'm going to go and have meself a poke round the building, see where all the exits are."

"Sure. You want something?" Liam asks, smiling at a woman who passes.

"I'll get it meself once I'm back." He grabs Liam by the elbow as he turns to go. "Don't let that pistol go poking its nose out, you hear me?"

"Aye. I've got it," Liam replies, looking at him in that way which is unique to handsome men who know precisely what each flicker of their eyes does to anyone in possession of a pulse.

He lets himself notice for a moment how the forearm's like iron, and ripples underneath his fingers, and then he lets go.

Liam about faces.

He lights another cigarette, and guards it more carefully this time, then slips himself into the pedestrians, so he is only another sad sod whose weekly cheque can barely be stretched over his groceries, let alone cab or coach fare.

Britain's Prime Minister, like any man with some power and an able prick, has himself a mistress he meets whenever the wife can be plied with his usual 'ah, sorry, lassie, the queen's in, got to pull the late hours again' excuse, which is, according to the lads have been watching him these past couple of weeks, notably often enough the wife is either excessively thick, or doing her own line on the side.

The Tower House, in which one of his great favorites, Mr. Orwell, once resided, is now a block of residential flats and far enough away from the shiny West End that any cheating asshat might rent himself a little nook and beg his own pardon for sowing his seed elsewhere, for here it's the far east where the docks casually oversee their midnight murders, and the gangsters conduct their territorial wars, and no man can be expected to behave himself among the poverty from which, the conservatives tell him, all crime and sin erupt.

Cameron has a ground level flat which the lads have photographed diligently; he passes it without looking twice.

The street which fronts the flats is a busy one, but you'd be surprised what a man can get away with in full daylight, in full view of his peers, right before God, under a grand sky or a shit one like this. Take his pale face with the bloom in either cheek, and the old man cap looming above 90% of the humans he passes; spot him at a dead sprint from 50 yards off.

And out comes the bobbie's notebooks and the searching looks and the body fresh on the pavement and all the babble and chatter any harsh reality like a murder knocks into a man's poor uncomprehending head, and sure you can take his left stone if at least a few of them don't swear on their dear old mother's grave he was a stunted midget of a black man.

He knocks his ash into a puddle.

His phone dings at him.

It'll be one of the lads updating him on the minister's progress, he thinks, but he sees when he checks it there's a message from Caroline, who wants him to know they are still in Cairo, but have moved on to a different hotel.

Another ding announces the address of their hotel, and precise directions from the airport, and he tries not to smile.

Bless her heart, anyway. Subtle as one of those bollocks kicks travels all the way into your throat.

He flicks his ash again.

A woman standing in front of one of the flats chatting away into her mobile smiles at him, and he gets the poor dumb deer feeling in him, that swelling of the chest and the sealing off of the throat and the feet planted in the rushing of those headlights, he blinks a few times, and forgets how to walk now that she's watching, chokes on his next inhale, rushes off with the tingle of the embarrassment in his ears.

He circles back round to the café where he left Liam, and holds the door open for a woman struggling with her three coffees and the wee one hanging onto her leg.

"Bless you, love," she tells him, and hurries out into the rain.

Liam has secured for himself a corner table where he can divide his eyes evenly, the one to the Tower, the other on the girl behind the counter, who stuns even his homosexual little heart.

"So?" Liam asks him as he pulls up a chair. "What do you think? Can we pop him and get away?"

"What's that you got?" he asks instead of answering, pointing at the cup in front of Liam.

"Oh, I dunno. I just pointed somewhere on the menu and said I'd have one of those. Me attention was busy elsewhere, you know what I mean? Have you seen the tits on that wan?" Liam nudges him. "Jesus, I'd just murder the pissflaps on her."

"Don't talk about her like that," he snaps.

Liam leans back in his chair and smiles. "Ah, go on and talk to her, then, if you're that sweet toward her."

"I'm not." He shrugs out of his coat, and drapes it over the back of his chair. "You just don't talk about women like that, all right? Would you want someone talking about your sister that way, then?"

"She's not me sister."

"Well, she's somebody's," he says, and gets up to order a coffee from the male barista, the plain stuff, black as tar, tastes like shite; these fancy rich people to-dos never can do anything decent with the simple tastes, you can order any milk frothed cappafrappu with the bubbles pretty as lace, have any number of flavors steamed, stirred, sifted into the poor old beans or the bag of leaves, but oh, forget the straightforward cuppa- might well as drink horse piss straight from the source.

"You have a girl?" Liam asks, shifting so his pistol does not bulge against his pocket.

"No."

"Why not? They've got to be knocking down your door. You know I said to Tom, I said to him, 'If I was a skirt, I'd straight level that man.' About you, I mean." He takes a sip of his drink. "Not sure if he was taking the piss, but Joe told me he thinks you might be queer."

He tries not to choke on his coffee, and sets it down, so he can free the hand round it to nervously drum his knee.

"I told him, Joe, a man can shoot like that, he's no fairy."

He adjusts his hat. "Right. Well, I'm glad you settled that." If a man's aim is straight, surely his dick follows suit.

Hetero Logic is the bendiest of all, Kol told him once. A man will do everything he can to prove to himself the irrefutable manliness of not only his own cock, but all those naked and vulnerable around him among those locker room fogs where what happens in the showers might stay in the showers. For him no holes but the smooth pink ones which are hinted at between vanilla-scented knees.

He takes another drink of his coffee.

The rain has strengthened; he has to sharpen his eyesight to make out the Tower House now.

"Christ," Liam says. "He'll slip right under our noses in this shit." Their knees touch beneath the table; Liam leaves his there, innocent of how the most casual of touches are the ones at which the heart leaps, and strains toward hope.

"It'll be all right. I've good eyesight."

Liam takes out his phone. "Joe texted me an hour ago; he's still at Buckingham."

"They don't meet until sometime round 17:00 at earliest, usually. We've a bit to wait."

Liam squints at him. "How many times have you done this before?"

"A few." Down with another long swig of the piss-flavored coffee; he'll chance the tea next time. Sure and they must at least manage a good breakfast tea.

"Me hand's shaking, look," Liam says, and sets it down on the table. "Is that normal?"

He remembers that stupid little boy Klaus took on his first real murder, not the instinctual tearing of the nearest victim, but the predator creeping through the alleyways, the stink of fear in the nose, the rapid tippity tapping of the suddenly knowing heels on the paving stones.

"It is," he says, trying not to choke on this sudden surge of fondness for the poor stupid thing. You can't train that out of a good man; you can issue him his government's weaponry, point him over a trench, drop him into a tank, you can, with all the years of budding resentment and familial tradition, stamp a cause deep in a man's bones, and tighten the boot a little more on his neck, so that the flame within him springs up brighter than he can snuff, and he knows in all the depths and corners of him he cannot live with this noose which the average citizenry will disregard so long as there is a roof over his head, and bread in his belly.

You can't tell the poor shaking hands, there's justness in the trigger which cools the pointer finger.

"Good. I thought maybe I wasn't cut out for the work. Me mother'd kick me within an inch of me life if she know. Me father's in prison for the same, you know. Well, for attempting it. He says it was in the name of the Republic, and he doesn't regret it. I thought he was an idiot when I was younger, but, well, here I am." Liam looks down at his hands. "They took whole great swathes of me family during the Troubles, just for being Catholic. Threw 'em in one of the camps. Me father used to get so angry, talking about it." He bounces his leg beneath the table. "You're not from the North originally, are you? Accent's a bit muddled."

"I travel a lot."

"Aye. Sounds Southern mostly. Dublin?"

"I was born in Killarney. But I spent a fair amount of me time in Dublin. I was -well, me family, anyway, I wasn't yet a twinkle in me mother's eye- in Dublin during the Troubles."

In 1919, probably fighting alongside this infant's granda.

Liam glances out the window; he hasn't bothered to check. He's got the ears dialed up so he can at first hint of that voice which he has studied by way of various internet clips leap up from the table, and casually gather his firearm.

"I'm sorry about the fairy comment earlier. If I was out of line." Liam looks up from his coffee, under the heavy eyelids, under the thick lashes, and he feels the heart slow suddenly in him, and the hot pressure of that knee against his own. "You are, aren't you? Joe was only being a fuck about it, so I told him the thing about the shooting."

He looks out the window.

Only by the grace of his transition did he escape a good faggot stomping from the various men of his association, the majority of which have been, if not decidedly hetero, brutally repressed, and don't appreciate someone who walks like a man, and shoots straighter than any top-rated sniper, who hasn't the grace to announce his flamboyancy by way of his poncey gait, or his pink shirts, who was like any one of them till he misinterpreted a signal, and laid his hand on the wrong thigh.

Oh, they're not shit, he tells himself, every time.

But you can never break him with your fists as he has broken you with his words.

Any general will laugh at that immortal claim of the pen which outweighs the sword, sure, he'll say, with a poke to your ribs, a word will spit the head like a melon, and lay the breast clean to the bone, but humans, he can tell you, having himself been shot, stabbed, and on occasion, blown up, have never developed the armaments which open a man all the way down to his shame.

"Tim?" Liam prompts him, leaning back with a loud creak in his chair.

He flicks his eyes away from the window, and lands them squarely on Liam's. Face like an angel his ass, he can freeze a man down to the stones when he wants to. "I am, and if you've a problem with it, we can settle it out back."

"Ah, don't be like that. So am I," Liam says, and presses the knee with pointed forwardness into his own.

He blinks.

Makes a try for his tongue.

Thinks the throat must have closed round it, untouchable as it is.

"Half, anyway," Liam goes on. "I do like women. A lot. But men are just grand as well. Why we have to be stuck with one, I'll never understand." He smiles and leans forward so the voice slithers across the table, low enough no one else will hear it, their fingers racing on over the laptops and the lips hovering unstunned over the paper cups, children gabbing on to their mothers, who with dumb ears stand, unmoved, mere feet from the table which his hand can no longer feel. "I'll suck your cock so hard you'll scream. Do you like that idea? Or would you rather," he drops his voice to a whisper, "wrap your lips round mine? I bet you suck it real well, don't you? I bet you could take me all the way back to the throat. I bet you'd sit there on your knees and let me throat fuck you. Do you like to be come on, Tim, hmm? Or do you swallow?"

Liam leans back with the same smile, lacing his hands behind his head, and deepens the little dimple at the corner of his right cheek. A bit of the hair flops down over one of the dark eyes, but he doesn't brush it back, no, he lets that thick little comma sit there, so you can imagine your hand wrapped in it, and how the throat would arch as you run your tongue down it, what the full lips might spill in either moans or expletives when you bite at the tender skin over the collarbones-

"Cameron's here," he says, and picks up his jacket.

* * *

Collar popped against the jaw line; fag between the lips.

Hat pulled down so the brim shades the eyes, and makes of the cheekbones a mystery.

The feet patter out the same old tired tattoo which the rest of the shoes ring from the cobblestones.

And when you stir the gun in its pocket, when you touch the cold barrel, and warm the butt, you are any innocuous stranger for a moment shielding his hands in that oven which any decent coat offers the disgruntled fingers.

The eyes do not pace the condemned man, nor measure his height; you see, casually, the back of the head which for a moment eclipses your view.

He hears Liam gripping his own pistol, and wrestling his heartbeat, and the slick of the vomit will right now be cresting his throat.

He taps out his cigarette.

Any shitbrained fuck has never seen war, or for even a moment scrambled for his life in a back alley will tell you, there isn't honor in shooting a man who never saw you coming.

Toe to toe; that's how bollocks are appraised.

But he wouldn't be a shitbrained fuck if he had any sense in his soft eejit synapses.

He takes out his .45.

Liam, he can hear, has grasped the pistol, oiled it down with a nice sweat, but has not cleared it of the jumper.

He cocks the hammer.

Cameron's head explodes all over the car's window.

It's nicely done; he doesn't break stride, and his calculation is just as precise as he expected, the spatter stains the vehicle, but not a drop mars his face, he is, in the eyes of law and God, just as pristine as the rest of the tourists goggling the London skyline.

"Shit. _Shit_ ," he hears Liam yell, and grabs him by the collar of his jumper.

Cameron's bodyguards are similarly inclined to blister their mother's poor ears, and open fire.

He's too close to the first to shoot him if he wants to walk out of this street just as pretty as he entered it, and butt strokes the man in the face; the nose goes cock-eyed. The firing hand for a crucial moment drops instinctively.

He shoots the other.

Liam has sufficiently recovered himself, and pulls his pistol.

The guard with the red smear where once his nose sat quite proudly makes a dive for the car's bonnet, and flops, screaming, to the pavement with a bullet in his knee.

He kicks the pistol from the white fingers; he won't have this fuck shooting him in the back as they make a sprint for it.

"Keep walking," he tells Liam, who like any new murderer has frozen halfway between his fight and his flight instincts. " _Don't_ run. Nice and casual, lad, to the end of the street."

"Please don't; please _don't_ ," the guard says, and he pops the man square in the teeth, which at this distance is a right fucking mess, the .45 blows them to smithereens, the skull is what you might call a pasty sort of mist, the wet chunks loan the bonnet a moist new ornament.

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck _fuck fuck_ ," Liam hisses, and speed walks as casually as a man ever did to the end of the street, past the flats which have begun to admit a few curious heads into the torrent, the hood flipped up over his dark head once more, the pistol safely pocketed.

He flicks his fag onto the second bodyguard.

He thinks that might be what sets off the screaming, not the new and gleaming bodies, but the casual desecration of the hallowed corpses, to which Death has done enough, and man need not add.

* * *

Liam's adrenaline has changed by the time they hop the tube back to the hotel in Picadilly Circus. Gone, the shaking hands, and the tremulous voice; gave him a seeing to, the English bastard, he declares.

He grabs Liam by the collar of his jumper, and near puts him through the wall when he kisses him.

You can tell the ones have never been touched by a man; no slip of a woman has ever pinned them with a hand, so there's the moment of the drowning panic, when suddenly a lad realizes, his fella can do anything he likes, and only common decency between himself and violation.

He's only ¼ decent or so, and gives Liam a thorough enough necking to confuse him; two Mikaelsons and you bet your fucking bollocks he knows what he's doing with his tongue.

"Wait; wait," Liam gasps, pushing him back by the shoulders, and trying to smile the terror out of his eyes. "Wait a moment. I need a piss."

He steps back.

For a moment Liam slumps against the wall, staring wild-eyed at him.

He licks his lips.

He used to see Klaus do that a lot. It always scared him at least a little; you knew the bastard was about to commit some violence, perhaps upon yourself, but still you couldn't help how it stirred everything southerly.

He shucks his coat as Liam disappears into his room, and rolls up his sleeves.

The little bastard comes out all furtive, with the sickly smile in place, and the stake under his jacket, focusing his handsomest look.

He whirls himself right across the room and grabs the fucker's hand, stake and all, cracks the wrist loudly on the corner of the wall, kicks the left knee hard enough he feels like an aftershock the crunching of the tendons through his own foot.

Liam screams.

He kicks the stake away from the groping hand, and now with the mangled one Liam manages, with great effort, to hunt free the crucifix round his neck, which his shirt collar has concealed, and holds it out toward him, screaming, "Back, _back_ , demon!"

He bends down to snap the chain, and gets a dash of water straight in the face.

"The fuck are you doing?" he demands, taking the crucifix and the vial from his good hand, and chucking them somewhere over his shoulder, where they land noiselessly on the plush carpet. "What was that?"

"Holy water," Liam gasps, his throat heaving. "It's supposed to- you're supposed to- it was supposed to-"

"Burn me? You've got the wrong vampire mythology, lad," he says, and jerks Liam to his feet.

He screams again when his weight is abruptly shifted onto the ruined knee. Well, cry him the river Shannon, perhaps you shouldn't have tried to murder him, you little maggot shit.

He throws Liam onto the bed, and presses his knee into the spine, leaning all 190 lbs. of him into it, then into the fine dark hair with his hand, which does indeed make a nice handle, he hasn't even fucked it up with any of that shite pomade, soft as any girl's pampered locks, it is.

He yanks so hard on it he tears out a good chunk.

The back bows awkwardly; the frail neck skin wrinkles; if he were a creepy fuck such as he might have kept company with in the past, he'd run his tongue over it, and lay his cheek against the flinching tendons, so he could feel the fear vibrate through him, and think of it later with his prick in his hand.

Got enough propriety left in him to leave off the creeper groping, but he does give the head another yank, and so satisfy the little sadist which the transition wakens in the best of men, who wants him to fuck this lad up good.

"How did you know about me?"

"Me granda- me granda has a picture of you. From 1920."

"Where'd you hear about the holy water and the cross?"

Liam says nothing.

He gives the fine head another vicious yank. "I can use me creepy mind control demon powers on you, or else torture it out of you. I'm being polite."

"Everybody knows about it," Liam gasps.

"No, they don't. Tell me where you got that information, or I'll show you what they used to do to prisoners in the Russian gulags. You don't fuck about with 'things like me', Liam, you blistered _cunt_. You think you're the first man has tried to seduce me so he can murder me?"

Liam takes a shaky breath. "There's a handbook. On the internet. It's on tumblr. It's got something like 100,000 reblogs on it. It's even been tweeted a few times. Not everyone takes it seriously, but enough do."

"What handbook?"

"It's a guide." He takes another breath, tries to shift, stops when he feels the knee pinion him more firmly. "All about how to defeat vampires. The crucifix and the holy water- it said they'd work! It said there's misinformation out there, that for years the vampires have been circulating rumors about something called vervain, that you can't hurt them with it, that you need a cross- oh Christ, are you going to rape me?"

Jesus, Mary and Joseph. "Yes, Liam, that's what us queers do. We see a man, we just go into a blind frenzy, start firing rainbow death rays from our pricks, and then drag our stunned victims back to our fairy lairs where a dozen of us have at him like a rabid gay buffet. Can you take your head out of your arse so I can ask you some more questions?" He yanks at the hair again; Liam begins to pant through his nose, the lad's whole body trembling beneath him. "Who put it out? The handbook?"

"A man called Nicholas. Nicholas Sonof Mikael."

He rubs at his eyes, squeezes them shut for a moment while he pinches the bridge of his nose. "Nicholas son _of_ Mikael, Jesus _Christ_ , that cunting bag of diseased squirrel arseholes- what the fuck is he after?"

He flips Liam onto his back, and sits on his chest, so he can pin both arms with his knees. "Does anyone else know about me?" he asks.

"Yes," Liam replies immediately.

"I think you're lying to me, Liam."

"Oh Christ, oh Christ, please don't kill me," Liam begs, with all twenty-two of his fresh young years in his voice.

"Do you want to say your rosary?" he asks instead.

"No, Christ, Tim, please, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I won't tell anyone, you'll never see me again, please please _please_ -"

He snaps Liam's neck.

* * *

 **New Orleans, 2014**

He is listening to Liszt's Trauvorspiel und Trauermarsch on an iPod left behind by Kol and browsing his library when an associate rings his mobile to tell him now, at last, two and a half months into his exile, the military is making its move.

The Trauermarsch has just begun in his left ear as he lifts his phone to the right.

He feels in his spine the vibration of those dark bass notes, how the pianist lets Death at first remain an impartial observer, he is merely present, neither particularly interested nor particularly antagonistic, and then gradually, the fingers press with more urgency, there is the ominous swelling of the higher notes, the listener is struck suddenly by this portentous presence, he shivers, feels in his own dark and silent corner of the earth nothing but the crescendoing footsteps, which touch the graves before him now with purpose, each is a stepping stone, Death does not merely come but he leaps, he springs, he rushes madly onward, and through the pianist's warlock touch man feels suddenly, I am mortal, He is inexorable-

He smiles.

"Then it begins, mate," he says, and as the final notes chime and fade, he taps the frail glass to replay it.

* * *

 **A/N: The Cillian Murphy show Tim references is 'Peaky Blinders', which you should watch. Cillian Murphy is a WWI vet in post-war Birmingham. He knocks lots of skulls together. And also he has razor blades in his hat and you shouldn't say bad things about his mother.**

 **Also, I just kind of made an educated guess about what kind of security Britain's Prime Minister would have when meeting up with a lady friend for an affair, because, well, how do you research the security of British politicians for the purpose of assassinating them in a story without leaving this really suspicious electronic trail of political murder plots in your wake?**


	4. Part Four

**A/N: Well, fuck of a long update, huh? I won't blabber too long, other than to say that this is the last part of this fic; from here we move on to the thirteenth and (what is shaping up to be) the final entry in the series. God knows precisely how many words it'll take me to wrap everything up, so if you're not looking forward to the end of this series, it'll still take us a while to get there. Knowing me, the last fic will be 13 parts and itself the size of _War and Peace_.**

 **The Dicken's quote 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times etc.' is, of course, the opening line of _A Tale of Two Cities_.**

 **'Perfect happiness is unattainable; so too, perfect misery.' This is not actually a quote, but rather a paraphrase of a line from Primo Levi's _Survival In Auschwitz_ , which is an excellent book. The Dickens story Tim mentions while musing over why _Christmas Carol_ eclipsed its popularity is another Christmas novella Dickens wrote in the 1840s called _The Chimes_ ; it was very well-received in its day, but for some reason is now almost forgotten while _Carol_ has enjoyed lasting fame.**

 **Warnings for pretty graphic sex, so maybe don't read this if there's a chance your boss could be peering over your shoulder.**

* * *

 **Cairo, 2014**

In this rigidly pious country, alcohol is rather more difficult to come by than he would prefer; to simultaneously mingle with the locals and shit one's face (can he use the phrase in that way?) is rarely an option. There are, of course, any number of hotels and restaurants which cater to tourists like himself, who wish to spend their holidays utterly obliterated, but he has for this afternoon chosen to patronize a coffee house where he can listen carefully to the voices around him, and adjust his comprehension of Arabic to match the updated phrases, and the indigenous slang, to carefully tweak his accent and to observe any grammatical shifts or vocabulary additions.

The small room is nearly obscured by sheesha smoke; he smudges some of the sawdust underfoot with the toe of his boot, and relaxes back in his chair, letting his knees spread.

He looks down at his phone, which he has been studying for some five minutes, trying to decide, ought he to try Tim, just a short text, nothing particularly demanding, just a simple, hello, darling, couldn't nap off my latest excesses, was just wondering if there is for me any hope in this particular century, or even the next, but he supposes Tim has answered that rather decisively, with his two and a half months of silence.

He slips the phone back into his pocket, and takes a sip of his karkade, for a moment letting the bright sting of the hibiscus sit on his tongue. The ice clinks in his beaker. He tips his head back to inhale a secondhand whiff of sheesha.

This is a good thick brew the patron of the next table over is stewing in the glass bowl of his hookah pipe, which he sends skyward with a purse of his lips and a heavy gasp of his lungs. The smoke tastes of apple, and something lemony. It is not dissimilar to his karkade.

He takes another sip of his drink, eyes for a moment the tenderest of the necks around him, which are mostly old, rather grizzled, forged by sun and sand, but here and there is a young thing bronzed but not beaten, with the soft brown eyes that always remind him of a doe, and he wonders which of them will make it out alive.

The karkade puckers his mouth once more, hovering right on the verge of bitterness, where he cannot tell whether he quite prefers it or not, but the color is very nice, just like a vein fresh-cut, and anyway, that lingering aftertaste of the tropics he does like, the alien burst of something which you cannot quite identify, and for a moment must be mulled over by the taste buds.

He takes out his phone, spins it on the table, leans back in his chair so that he is no longer touching it.

A text wouldn't be forward.

He's only popping in for a quick hello, and anyway, Tim's shy, they parted on poor terms, he will right now be wandering Dublin with his hat full of rain, his hands in his pockets, the cobblestones letting off their moist stink of time and technology, he will be wondering to himself, has anything changed, that Kol, he's so staggeringly handsome, sure he's a thousand other takers ready to step right into me boots-

He stops the phone with his finger.

For a moment, he stares at himself in the surface of it.

He fixes his left eyebrow, his right, sweeps back the little flick of bang which is always ill-contained, wipes his sweaty hands down the thighs of his jeans.

He lunges for his phone, but suavely, of course, as he does everything, darlings, unlocks it with a quick tick tick tick of the pass code, navigates into his messages where he first checks for any texts he may have missed, and then, before he can change his mind, taps Tim's name with his thumb and sits back in his chair.

He is not particularly sure how one goes about apologizing to their gay lover, having never before had anything to apologize for, if you know what he means.

 **hello** , he types, and deletes it.

 **hello, tim** , he types, and deletes the message once more.

 **i sincerely regret to inform you**

 **i am**

 **you are**

 **do you**

 **i miss you but i understand** , he types and is in the process of deleting when the flash of the television in the corner for a moment catches his attention, and he looks up to see his brother's face on it.

* * *

Caroline is sleeping peacefully when he lets himself into her hotel room.

He yanks open the blinds.

She lets out a noise he assumes is not complimentary, and pulls the sheet over her head.

"Rise and shine, darling. There's something I need you to see," he says, and turns on the television, which is set already to an English language channel.

"If it's your penis, I swear to _God_ , Kol," she says, and then abruptly she stops, and sits upright, hair falling loosely round her shoulders, the finer strands floating out to either side of her face with that crackly magic of the static charge. "Why is Klaus on my TV?"

* * *

The news stations are not airing the entire video, which will certainly twist Nik's panties, but social media has of course already got its hands on the full version, which can be viewed at length on youtube.

First you hear the footsteps, which pound that long-ago herald of war which any of Homer's more illustrious steeds must have sounded on Troy's purple sands.

And then: the swelling of the notes, which for a moment reach none but his own ears, and then slowly, step by step along the keyboard, the tune puffs up with its own importance, you detect the weight of its message, there is down every listening spine a zip of strange lightning, and in the bellies a white aftershock.

"What is that? The music?" Caroline asks quietly.

"A funeral march," he says. One of Liszt's, if he's not mistaken; Nik's a fan.

The music is pitched just exactly right so it does not overwhelm the footsteps, so those synchronized drums strike with each new stride this steady rhythm of man's most primitive war, sans his tanks, sans his sniper rifles, there is only the thundering of the mounts, and the clattering of the wheels-

"Oh my _God_ , I cannot _believe_ him!" Caroline blurts out.

But, of course, from Nik you can expect little else. If an entrance disturbs no head, and halts no idle gossip, his brother sees no reason in making it.

The first heads break the horizon line; the camera has pulled back to take the shot in wide.

And here is his brother, lashing on his team, the curls disturbed by the wind, the feet planted so he is braced against the chariot's jolting movements, and in its traces four vampires who haul the vehicle at speed, drawing him on toward the faint mist which now begins to coalesce farther down the street.

He starts to laugh.

"It's not _funny_! Oh my God, this is not _funny_ , that _jackass_ ," Caroline hisses, hitting him in the shoulder a little more violently than is necessary, if you ask him.

The sun has just breached the horizon perhaps an hour or so previous; it spills, yolk-like, onto the street, drips down each looming building, polishes Nik's hair so that it is automatically the focal point of this scene. He might have said once, when Nik commanded for him moon and stars and any other mystery of creation, that this too he has planned.

At the far end of the street, the mist uncurls a few uncertain tendrils, which for a moment cautiously finger the air, and limp along the pavement.

Nik controls his team almost imperceptibly; there is a movement he nearly misses, a subtle tweaking of the reins, and the churning legs slow; the heaving flanks take the grateful gasp which signals the end is nigh, for either man or beast, what do they care; the trembling shoulders sink just a trace.

The song has reached its zenith.

For a moment, the fog sits inanimate, just a lazy cloud, pregnant with storm but not yet committed to it.

The wheels strike sparks from the pavement.

Nik tilts his head so the camera has his best angle.

The song concludes at exactly the moment the wheels turn their final revolution.

There is the long in-drawn breath every war and every soldier learns to endure, when for a moment each side eyes his enemy's vulnerabilities, weighs his own chances, hefts his axe or shoulders his rifle, his mount shifts underneath him, the trench rains a few startled drops onto his head, beside him his mate sweats deliciously, and-

The fog opens fire.

Nik's team tries to disperse, but is caught in the brunt of it and yanked round like marionettes.

The first helmeted heads break the fog, and the rifle barrels after.

Nik walks forward in his Henley and his jeans, whatever brand name boots Lijah has probably advised him on not overwhelming the gunfire, but neither are they drowned by it. Nik knows how to walk so he is never forgotten.

He is shot first center of mass, half a dozen, perhaps a dozen, two dozen times; the automatics just unload on him, stumbling him for a moment in his strut, the air red all round him, the lungs hitching on this shredded breath and then smoothly sipping from their regenerated next.

You can hear, or at least he can, the heart noisily repairing itself.

The slick stretch of the muscle, the sucking of the bullets which are pushed, unceremoniously, back out of his chest.

Nik cracks his neck.

The barrels re-position.

And now up darts his arm, so quickly he and Caroline both merely see the beginning of its arc, the blur between, and then the hand in front of his forehead, which for a moment lingers dramatically in place while the men look on in stunned horror.

Slowly, slowly, the arm drifts out to one side.

Nik drops the bullets he has caught.

When he attacks, it's simply a transition: he is ten feet away, and then he is not.

He never uses any of their guns, though blindly, panicking like beasts, they open fire on him, hitting one another, hitting themselves, the buildings to either side taking the brunt of their terror while this smoke screen of theirs, impervious, slowly dissolves and the sun, unmindful of this carnage, smiles down as it would on any bland country picnic.

Nik makes sure the camera sees how he doesn't need the automatics, he doesn't need the sidearms holstered at their hips, just his hands, and the teeth which elongate far further than a human's.

He cuts off any of the men who try to make a dash back down the street, rips the spine from one, the head off another, and then for a moment sticks his face right in the stump, so the camera can capture each slow inch of the fangs as they sink into the ragged skin, and the erotic lapping of the tongue.

He leaves one alive.

The man is stripped of his helmet and his weaponry; he can no longer stand, and is dragged before the camera by the collar of his shirt.

Nik does not bother to wipe the blood off his face.

"State your name for the camera, mate," he says with the cheerful friendliness Nik uses when he is at his deadliest.

"Ryan Gonzales." He can barely spit it out.

Caroline covers her mouth.

"And who sent you, sweetheart?"

"The army. I'm an Army Ranger," he gasps, holding up his hands like he is at gunpoint, the fingers trembling.

"And, Ryan Gonzales, the Army Ranger, what was your purpose in visiting my city, hmm?"

"To kill…to kill vampires."

Nik licks his lips. "What you mean is, to kill helpless men and women who were trapped and unconscious, who could not fight back, who for over two months now have been slowly starving to death. On account of their…species."

He gives the camera the smile that will win more than half of its audience to his side by virtue of his charm alone.

"My name is Klaus. I have, for ten centuries now, lived in peace among you. My brethren and I have slept among you, ate alongside you, fought with your grandparents in the Great Wars. We have known-"

"Why is he saying this, he is _lying_ , oh my God, what is he _doing_ ," Caroline demands, seizing his arm and giving it a good squeeze right down to the bone.

"Because people are stupid, darling. He'll have the bleeding hearts trending for him in a matter of minutes. 'Not all monsters'. Something like that."

"-you have coexisted alongside us, never the wiser. But this is a declaration of war, against myself, against my people. We have been trapped here inside this city, in accordance with the wishes of the United States government, so that we can be slaughtered like animals. What I have done today, what you have seen, was in defense of myself, of my people."

He snaps his fingers.

In the buildings all round him, the lights simultaneously flash on, so the camera can see, and all those breathless watchers on its other end, the faces which crowd the windows now, pitifully pale.

"I have," Nik says grandly, tightening his grip on Gonzales, "your husbands, your wives, your daughters, your sons. I will kill them, every hour upon the hour, until we are released."

"What does he mean? Why do they need to release him?" Caroline asks, digging in with her fingers.

"He'd only let the soldiers get so far down the road."

"What?"

"I mean, earlier, when they attacked him- some of them turned and ran toward the end of the street, and Nik would always cut them off before they could reach it, even though he could have easily finished killing whoever was in his hand and gone after them at his own leisure. It's like there was a line he didn't want them to cross."

"Oh my God. Oh my God," Caroline says.

Nik sucks a drop of blood from his thumb, very theatrically.

"The witches -if he can't leave- Bonnie could do spells to keep a vampire from crossing a certain ward or whatever. And a few years ago, there were some vampires in a tomb or something like that- I don't know a lot about it, I kind of wasn't 'up' on the supernatural world at the time. But vampires could go in, but not come out again, because of some kind of spell? Something like that. It could be…that's why he made sure I was out of the city."

She sits for a moment, dumbstruck with her own realization, and then begins to fumble round for the phone on the little table beside the bed.

"He's not going to answer you."

Onscreen, Nik looks straight into the camera and smiles. "I have an army. But I don't need it."

Caroline barks into her phone: "I'm not ignoring you anymore. You better call me _immediately_."

The video trails off into eerie silence.

Caroline sets the phone on her bare knee; shame on Nik for distracting him. He barely noticed she's slept in just a T-shirt and some little scrap of lace those marketers of women's undergarments have the gall to actually label underwear.

"So what happens now?" she asks, scrubbing a hand back through her hair.

"Well, darling, I think now we go to war with the humans."

* * *

 **London, 2014**

He decides to stay on in London for a bit, keep his head down till he can judge how the dust is going to settle after that shitstorm in New Orleans, and heads out to thoroughly fuck himself up.

He's fair wrote off the map two nights out of three, hopping about from gay bar to gay bar, if he is sober enough watching the drag shows and if he is not sucking cock in one of the toilets.

Six pints in one night and the lads on either side of him strike up a conversation; John is on his right, Will on the left, real rough-looking fucks, dockhands probably, good-looking fellas but just as like to kick your head in as give a man what he's looking for, and they laugh and ask him how fuckin' old he is anyway, to which he replies, "Old enough to consent" because he is, at this time, an hour into the conversation and now a good ten pints into his night, seeing double if not triple, and "Older than I look" is such an old used bint of a saying, and anyway, he's not looking to stir any suspicions about how many years he's got under his belt. He hasn't seen much of Klaus' war here in London, but last thing he needs is another absolute gobshite trying to stick him before his time.

He leaves with them both.

They might be after kicking in his back door, he realizes halfway down the street, young and fucked as they think he is, and a knife on at least one of them; he can smell the metal.

He only ever had one lad try it on him like that; neither of these two want to know how that ended.

But, ah, they're friendly enough about it when he takes them back to his hotel. Don't even try to pinch his wallet or anything when he takes off his coat and tosses it over a chair, and he hears the jacket John removes clink when it hits the same chair, so he's not got the knife on him anymore, which is right fortunate. He was hoping not to have to kill either one of them.

The transition from full shirts and trousers to birthday naked is a little fuzzy in his head, but one of them is on top of him almost immediately, and Jesus it feels good, the big hand groping down to jerk their cocks at the same time, so the undersides are gliding along one another, and there's the other mouth tonguing at his neck, and occasionally sliding up to his mouth, and licking inside, where he can feel the tongue all hot and heavy, just barely touching the tip of his own, and another set of hands sliding down his ribs, over his stomach, up to his nipples, the fingers are so fucking warm, and the ceiling spins pleasantly, and then, oh, oh, _fuck_ , the hand leaves off his prick, and John -he thinks it's John- slithers down him until his hot mouth is on the tip of his cock and Will lips at his neck and he sighs, "Fuck; _fuck_."

The lips slide down over his cock, sucking hard at the head; his leg twitches.

He curls his toes.

The mouth on his neck slides down, so leisurely, glides over the collarbone, slicks the chest, and then he feels a breath on his nipple, and arches up to meet it.

There's another great pull on the head of his prick; he clutches his hands in the sheets.

For a while the mouth just sucks at him, and he sees little spots in front of him, feels the leg twitch again when there's the broad swipe of the tongue over his slit, and then a slow rimming around the head, and then, oh Christ, down the underside, down, down, one slow inch at a time, till he's seated in the throat.

Will kisses his mouth roughly.

He reaches to the side, blindly, feeling along Will's thigh for his cock, and giving it a rough squeeze, feeling how the hips buck forward, the moist tip slides along his thumb, jabs into his palm, he grips the base, feels how that freezes the man, how for a moment he has to set his shoulders, and catch his breath, and then he starts to pump.

John begins to suck him in earnest now.

He thrusts up into his throat, that wet hole squeezing him so fucking tight, Christ, Christ, oh Jesus, and then here's Will's tongue in his mouth once more, and he's still jerking that cock, and Will, Christ he makes these noises right into his mouth, he's gone sloppy now, he's got no finesse to him, that's how hot he is-

He pulls John's head up by the nape hairs, breathing heavily, Will still thrusting into his hand.

John straddles his chest, and leans down to kiss him just as Will pulls back.

He slides his hands up both John's thighs, thumbs the creases of his hips, sucks the bottom lip into his mouth so he can taste himself on it, running his tongue along the swollen mouth, and when John moans, he pulls away and makes a grab for Will's neck, so he can jerk him right down into the action.

"Get off me," he tells John, and fresh-cheeked lad of whatever years they took him for notwithstanding, the man obeys.

He knocks the lube off his nightstand and into his hand.

Will licks his lips as John kisses along his throat. "Are you a bottom?" Will asks, kissing back distractedly when John makes his way to his lips.

"Not tonight."

"You can fuck me," John offers, smiling up at him from where he is working on Will's neck.

He hopes you can take a pounding, lad. Should have prowled round a bit longer for a vampire, he thinks; didn't know exactly how worked up he was till now, warming the lube on his cock, with the two men watching in between their necking.

But, ah, John's a fucking sport, and holds up well enough.

He grips the bed board while he fucks into John, John making little wheezing noises beneath him, and pushing back as best he is able, Will jerking it just as hard as he ever saw a man go after himself.

* * *

He's so pissed one evening he actually goes home with a lass, who's after wearing the knob off him on account of his being such a proper gentleman and all.

Only she's madder than Alice's hatter lad, and spends the short walk back to her flat trying to swallow the tongue out of him while he tries to remember where it is the lasses like his hands to go, if a tit grope might be too forward, but sure she solves that for him, grabs his great big oaf fingers and spreads them across the tits herself, so he can feel the nipples underneath and how they're peaked already, and then _Jaysus_ , she gets such a handful of him, right in one of the alleys where anyone might glance down and see-

He's got so much whiskey in him a regular fella'd have to wear the skin right off his prick, trying to get a response out of it, but he's already half-hard when she grabs him, and is she after towing him along like that, he wonders hazily for a moment, but a rub and a flick of the tongue over the spot on his neck where he's most sensitive, and she leaves off to motion him up the stairs of her flat.

Christ he's fucked, can't even read the sign, the stairs are first one tread higher and then one tread lower from where he originally placed his foot, and the lass, fuck's sake, what's her name again, laughs at him and grabs him by the collar, and then the crazy bint throws him into a wall and starts to slobber all over him, sucking at his tongue, one hand down his trousers while she fumbles round behind her, trying to get the door to her flat open-

He flips them round and braces his hands on either side of her head and oh, fuck it, he goes full in, for a moment awkwardly bumping her nose, and then the lips mashing, the teeth clashing, she lets off his prick and instead gets a handful of his ass so she can pull his hips into hers, and now the door bursts open behind her, and they stumble in like a pair of eejits, knocking over a lamp-

She grasps his collar again in one hand and shoves him toward the bed.

His knees hit the edge of it and he falls backward.

She kicks the door shut.

"Do you want- I mean- the before stuff-" he gasps out between kisses as she throws herself down on top of him.

She takes off her shirt.

There's nothing quite compares to a man, the breadth of the shoulders and the swell of the biceps, the cords in the forearms, the slender hips that peek all coquette like over his jeans, but women are grand, the softness of them; he touches her belly, tentatively.

She shoves his hand underneath her trousers.

He hasn't been inside a woman in he doesn't remember how long; the novelty of it sits all hot in his stomach, draws everything up tight, so he can feel the nerves humming all the way down to his tip toes, and then she grabs at his hat, screws her fingers down into it so she's got a fistful of his hair underneath it, and she yanks it off his head, taking some of the hair with it, and Jaysus, she's straight crackers, for fuck's sake-

When she slides down onto him, he lets out a little breath, slips his hands up her smooth back, cups them over the round hips, and then she tries to fucking swallow his head again while he's thrusting all slow and shivery, like, so you can feel it building in every muscle, the heat of it in the belly and the helpless curling of the toes.

He gives up trying to impress either of them, and they commence with fucking like a couple of rabbits three sheets to the wind.

They crack the wall with her headboard.

She comes three times.

He forgets, begging his pardon, the presence of a lady, and gasps out a whole slew of curse words when she tightens up that final time, and he can hear, through the roaring in his ears, and the slosh of the whiskey, her breathless laughter. "That's what I like about you Irish chaps. Such creative cussers."

He sneaks out after she falls asleep, leaving a polite thank you note, which is the only thing ought to be done by any well-raised lad whose mother did her duty by his manners, and skips down the stairs and into the street with his hands in his pockets.

Mary and Joseph, he doesn't even know where the fuck he is.

* * *

A group of drag queens adopts him one night thanks to his getting pathetically soused and jabbering on to one of them about this dimple-chinned fuck of a lad he used to see. He's quite pitiful, he is soundly informed with that English brutality, but they'd like to keep him on account of him being cute as a button, which he imagines is going to do wonders for his reputation among the IRA lads- oh that Timothy, cute as me mott's wee purse dog; I like to sneak him biscuits when he's disappointed herself- but these lads can drink him under the table and still walk a straight line in sparkly six inchers, and sure what other criteria do you need for a friend?

"I suppose you couldn't be a doll and fix my eyeliner, Tim?" Dave, his favorite of the bunch, if and it's not loutish of him to pick, asks one night, patting some of the red stuff on his cheeks. "I imagine you haven't seen the inside of too many a lipstick tube, big strong thing like yourself."

Well, back in the 80s there was an 'incident', as the papers referred to it, but that was on the lads thought they might be able to pass him off as one of the more facially challenged lasses and fob him off on one of their drunker mates, who would, upon reveal, be ridiculed, exercise his great vocabulary of singularly Irish curse words, buy a round for the whole group in acknowledgement of how they'd got one over on him, clap a few backs, and return to his dogged pursuit of the real lasses.

In the interest of God's own honesty, events fell out slightly differently.

"No."

"Oh well. Never can get the damn line straight- Jack! Would you pull your cock out of Peter's fucking asshole and get your ass in here and help me for Christ's sake?" he hollers. "Jesus, Timothy, look at me, I'm a mess, my tits are all cock-eyed and I'm onstage in five."

"You look beautiful," he tells Dave, leaning his hip on the corner of the makeup table.

"Thank you honey, you are a rotten liar, but you're trying, and anyway, I can't get mad at that face." He adjusts his tits, and winks one of the great big spider eyes, the lashes floating down to leave little black dots just along the curve of his cheek. "Oh, Jesus, my mascara's not dried yet- _Jack_! Oh honey, could you go get Jack? I don't care if you have to pull him off that sod's rotten knob, you get him in here. And give me a kiss first, for good luck. My new boyfriend's in the audience tonight, and I need to blow his jockstrap clean off." Dave smears a great red stripe across his lips, and pats his cheek with a fond smile.

* * *

Dave's a flat near the docks, which after dark is a prime spot for any man looking to have his wallet pinched and maybe his head kicked in for good measure, so he walks him home on nights Dave's not out of the clubs till after midnight, smoking like any good tough, and wandering along with his collar up, though Dave take the piss out of him something awful for it.

He's in his street clothes, but not all the makeup's off, and they get a few stares and once a "would you look at these fucking bum chums" that takes the color right out of Dave's cheeks and tightens the lipsticked mouth with anger, but he says, "Oh, leave it, Tim; you're not getting your head stove in on account of a couple of wankers" when he's after squaring off with the larger of the two men.

He instead flicks his cigarette at the man, and gives him a look he's seen a time or two from a Mikaelson to his victim.

Ah, thanks, lad. He's always gratified to see someone occasionally gets it.

Dave always gives him a brief good-bye kiss when he safely reaches the door, and urges him to mind himself on the way back, and then up his stairs Dave clatters, and to the docks he goes, where you can find more than a few men nobody's going to miss, and oh, he supposes there's a rhythm to it, enough maybe to smooth all the little turbulances of the heart, which you can for a while persuade, here lad, it's like this, you're not hurting at all, you're not lonely at all, you don't want to know, oh, why did he do it-

* * *

London is starting to see little pockets of issues here and there, over this vampire business. Couple of lads beat in the head of a particularly pasty man they decide must be one of them, and a lass is cornered by a mob for the devious crime of wearing too much glitter, which he doesn't understand until Dave tells him, "Christ, Tim, have you never read _Twilight_?" and he sees himself on down to the nearest bookstore for a copy.

He picks up the series, and reads them in between Dave's shows, which subjects him to a good ribbing from the other lads, and is rather fucking unfair, if you ask him, as he's after pulling faces at each successive chapter, and making the horrible gurgling noises are all he can manage as he watches Ms. Meyer bend the fair English language over the table and fuck her without so much as a gob of spit.

He starts _New Moon_ because he has deep-seated issues with himself.

"Oh Jaysus- Jaysus- I'm Bella Swan!" he blurts out, jerking his horrified eyes to Dave's startled gaze in the vanity mirror.

"What are you on about?"

"Christ, lad, I'm Bella fucking Swan! Here she is sitting around moaning about her boyfriend and being a generally useless fuck and whingeing on about his perfect marble toes till I want to blow me brains out and Jaysus, it's _me_."

"Lovey, we found you moaning once into your beer over this mysterious ex."

"Well, I whine a lot in me head."

"About his perfect marble toes?" Dave leans toward the mirror to carefully touch up the wings of his eyeliner.

"No." He scrunches up his nose.

"Then I'd say you're all right. Are my tits straight?"

"Yes." He runs a hand over the hair at the nape of his neck, ruffling the pages in agitation. "Jesus."

"It's all right to grieve about whatever happened between the two of you," Dave says, dabbing on a little more mascara. "But eventually you're either going to have to forgive him, or get the fuck over it."

* * *

So he says to himself, Timothy, you've had a good sulk.

He's put on a beard in the last few months, and before his next night on the town he eyes himself up in the mirror of his hotel bathroom, razor in hand.

All right, it's a bloody down, a thirteen-year-old might crow over it, but a man ought to be shaving it down to the skin so's he can claim he's just preferring the bare look, and he cuts himself three times hacking at it, because he can shoot a man from 400 yards on a bad drunken cunt of a day, but he cannot carry off a simple fucking scraping of the face without hacking the fucking cheeks off him.

Dave takes him out to a bar in his neighborhood, a real dive, but he likes it, the shite shacks always have the most character, and he's doing right fine if he says so himself, up till the part of the night he remembers clearly, after which point everything blurs just a bit, and then he wakes up on Dave's floor in a puddle of his own vomit.

"Tim, love, you're just a sad fucking man," Dave tells him, but he brings him tea and orders him into the guest room where he is under strict command to stay until he can conduct himself like a responsible adult.

* * *

"Do you at least have any pictures of his cock so I can see if what you're mooning over is even worth it?" Dave asks him one night while they are playing cards in his flat by candlelight, as some gom's hit a power pole somewhere and knocked the electricity clean out of the lines.

"I don't have anything like that."

"Right, love, and you only fap to the Bible."

"You can't do that with the Bible. Have you got a four of diamonds?"

"Go fish, you lying little arsehole."

He flicks his cigarette to the other side of his mouth, worries a little at the end of it as he gropes his next card out of the stack in front of him. Dave gives the fag a pointed look. "Oh, what? It's not even lit."

"And gnawing at the bugger like that isn't putting all kinds of toxins into you?"

"I'll be all right." He nods toward the spray of cards in Dave's hands. "Are you going to go? I'm growing barnacles on me ass waiting for that old man motor of yours to turn over."

"I'm forty, you little bastard, and just as clear-minded and quick-witted as any 21-year-old tosspot stupid enough to poison himself. Do you have a king of hearts, you little shit?"

He tosses the card toward Dave, switches the cigarette once more, lipping a little extra at it, so Dave can hear how the tobacco crunches. He scratches his nose, and in his head rifles back over all the cards he knows Dave isn't holding. "Ace of spades."

Dave pushes the card over the table at him. "Describe it, then."

"What?"

"His cock."

"You're a pervert, you know that?"

"Then show me the pictures I know you've got on your mobile."

He squints at his cards. "There aren't any."

Dave just looks at him.

"Christ."

He hands over his phone.

"Ah- very nice. I see why we found you weeping into your Guinness."

"He'd be glad to hear that. Would you go?"

"Three of hearts."

"Go fish."

Dave tilts his head and contemplates him for a moment in the candlelight, the flickering of it rearranging his face into new and unfamiliar shapes, so that his cheeks belong to a stranger, and the eyes are hooded with alien menace. "Tim, love, you're a terrible liar."

"Oh, fine," he says, and flicks the three of hearts across the table. "Would you give me the bloody phone back now? I'll not have you stroking one off over it. Apple doesn't have a warranty against cum."

* * *

Mr. Dickens said, It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way- in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

And he thinks, so it is with London, and her great and minuscule tragedies.

Every age is its own peak and pit. 'Perfect happiness is unattainable; so too, perfect misery.' So it is for the children of this city who endure the death of their Prime Minister and are buoyed by the births of their own children, who teeter always between their despair and their joy. If today it is raining, tomorrow it will be sunny; or if it is not sunny, Tesco will have a sale on; or the grandchild has just taken their first step; and if Tesco hasn't a sale and the grandchild sits dumbly blinking with the arse firmly planted in his mute paralysis, the day after tomorrow, the Daily Mail will float a picture of the Queen and her best gently wrinkled Bitch Please on the battered old mug.

So they crawl, inch by inch, and hallmark by hallmark, back from what man knows in the pit of him will claim him eventually, the waiting darkness sometimes he thinks perhaps he ought merely to submit to, if it's only to seize him by the bollocks and take him screaming anyway.

And so his own anger balances with his longing, and slowly the latter trembles a little, and rises an inch or so higher; sure he can't be carrying the storm cloud over him forever.

He likes to stroll the market at Covent Gardens, where there is a shop carries biscuits big as his head, and to lean on one of the old stone pillars and watch the street performers who waver on their sticks or their ropes, and fling high the machetes to awe and flinch the gathered audience, where the children, the bloodthirsty beasts, lean forward in breathless entreaty of a slip or misplaced hand.

Caroline checks in regularly, bursting with chatter over the pyramids and the Nile and all the little odds and ends of her adventure, and it strikes him once, walking along the Thames, you show her a kindness any decent man ought to tender, and she rushes in with all the love a dog's only ever offered and offered, though he's gone to bones in a shed and had the snout stove in till he can only pant through his mouth, and he thinks, Jaysus, Jaysus, she's only nineteen, what's the world after, kicking a fresh young thing like that, and maybe he tears up a little though once he swore on his great big heart he wasn't some fucking softie.

He mightn't have been entirely candid about that.

But he's wiped his face before anyone can see and lit his next cigarette, and everyone knows a pretty man who smokes Means Business, if he'd risk a mug like this to cancer, to the tumor's far worse predecessor, the fine line- sure he's capable of anything up to and including the untimely interruption of your next Dr. Who marathon, the untamed bastard.

He takes to dubbing Dave Mother Dave, as the lad is always nagging him over whether he's had enough cock, food and drink for the day, in precisely that order.

It slips out one evening when he is drinking with the boys (some of whom are girls at the moment, their wigs all drunkenly aslant) that he knows how to tap dance well enough to harm neither himself nor precariously nosy audience members, which gives express permission for the boys to open the artillery full roar and come howling after him like the Germans he briefly shot at over some square of land or another back in '43.

It's decided in short order and sans any opinion of his own that he's to perform at one of their next shows, in between Dave's and Cindy's (currently Steve's) acts, which he protests just as eloquently as any man whose eyeballs have risen a level or two on the Guinness has flooded him to the brim.

"Fuck not. No."

"Don't be like that," Dave tells him, and in another moment he finds himself kidnapped by six very shitfaced drag queens, who pull him along by the shirt collar, and, when he breaks away from that, swipe his hat and streak teetering off down the sidewalk on their heels, so there's nothing for it but to dart out into traffic after the drunken fucks before they get their sparkly asses (and his cap) mown down.

He is conveyed to a shop where the clerk is loudly questioned as to his knowledge on tap shoes, and where some can be had.

Steve gets his number.

The hat and Dave sail on out the door, down the lane, round the corner, on up the next lane to the bright row of shops all strung out along the avenue.

He is nearly struck by a coach, chasing the asshole down.

"Would you fuck off, you child?" he yells after Dave, who, giggling, flashes him.

They are, on account of their inebriation, nearly ejected from the next shop, but then Meghan opens the great big lungs and in her deepest bass bellows, "This faggot will have his fucking shoes, chaps!" and after that everyone seems just a little too frightened to offer so much as an under-the-breath bugger off to a six foot black man with Captain America abs and six inch fuck-me heels.

"Size eleven, Timothy? So, does the old saying hold true, then?" Shonda asks, wiggling his foot into the taps he's got in one big hand.

"He's used my shower a couple of times. It's true," Dave cuts in.

"I think it's so cute how red he gets."

"Oh, Jesus, you should have seen him one night when we were over at that club on 12th- this bloody piece of absolute _prime_ walks in, he was a sight, and he sits down next to our friend here, who's suddenly academically interested in his beer, which he obviously hadn't enough of yet, as he can't squeak out so much as a word." Shonda tightens the laces on his shoe with a jerk nearly yanks him off the stool they've sat him on. "So I sashay on over to the rescue, and I tell him, "His name is Tim, he likes mid nineteenth century literature, long walks on the beach, and sucking your cock", and you can imagine how the ears went up then, like I'd put a match to them." She slaps his calf. "Try them out, sweetheart."

He clicks his heels obligingly against the floor.

"Get up, you little sod," Dave demands. "Do the scene from Singing in the Rain or something."

"I can't-"

"Here, I'll pull up the youtube clip on my phone," Steve butts in.

"Hello, mate, yes, you- would you be a doll and just pop down to the Tesco on the corner? My friend here needs some more alcohol before he can properly try out your merchandise," Kiki calls to one of the clerks.

He sighs.

Tightens the laces just a nip and off the stool and onto his feet where he tests the strange new weight of the taps which he hasn't donned in probably a decade or more, but there's the movement still softly breathing somewhere within, just needs to be dusted off a bit, and the joints properly warmed, which for him takes only the first few shy steps.

He gives them something fairly basic, few clicks on either shoe, a couple of leaps, the heel toe _cllclack_ of a little of his own heritage, sneaking in just a bit of the step dancing the tourists flood Galway to the gullet to watch in great fogs of Yank sweat.

The pissed goms cheer with such alarming zeal one of the clerks sneakily rings the coppers.

Meghan bear hugs him.

* * *

They tart him up a few days later in a nice white shirt and slacks and some black suspenders to tie the whole get-up together.

Off with the cap, and the hair slicked back away from his face, which they touch up with a bit of eyeliner and some of the red stuff Dave piles on his cheeks like he's armoring himself.

"Don't bitch," Dave tells him before he can say a word.

"He reminds me a little of a young Leonardo DiCaprio," Kiki says.

"You take that back!"

"What? What's wrong with that? I said _young_ Leonardo DiCaprio. I know he's a little bloated now, lovey, but he had everyone fluttering over him back in the day. What is it they call the in-betweens…oh, shit. Twees? Is that it?"

"Tweens," Dave corrects her.

"Tweens. That's right. The tweens were just in love with him. Anyway, I'm not saying you look like him, you just have that same pretty boy look. A little baby-faced. Innocent-looking." Kiki straightens his collar.

Dave carefully smoothes down a few strands of his hair.

"I hated _Titanic_ ," he mumbles.

"Oh, shh. Nobody hated _Titanic_. You're just trying to be different. Now what should he dance to?" Dave asks.

The girls want something by Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga. "Don't be stereotypes, you assholes," Dave scolds them all, and they are still bickering when Dave nudges him aside to preen in front of the mirror himself, and start assembling bit by bit his Sheila persona, which is to precede him onto the stage.

So somehow he is bullied out onto the stage, under the hot white light, where he stands and is gawped at by all the silent watchers who stretch each long and sticky moment before the music crawls its first tentative notes over the stage. He's sweated all his fecking nerves into his shirt, and must look an ass with the great half-moons under his armpits and the collar pasted to the adam's apple, and there's a lad half a foot or so back from the stage eyeing his bits, which makes him want to crawl for the curtains, but then Meghan, bless her, hollers, "Get 'em, Tim!" and from behind the curtain wafts that first strain, which from their blocks of dumb cement automatically lift the feet, and off he goes.

For a moment he is swept along on what strange tides music comes whispering in on, and carries you to the distant shores and untouched feelings you never thought to probe.

Then he realizes they have selected the song from the third class party scene of _Titanic_ , because they are bastards.

Dave catches the entire performance on his phone, and replays it at the most random and embarrassing moments.

* * *

When it rains, London puts up its collar with a sigh.

Dublin, half-drowned fable city of three thousand mosses, where the mermen lay their pretty brides, and the Liffey rises in the east, does not see so much.

But a man does his best brooding in the rain. He can root down through all the worst and best bits of him, and turn them over like a puzzle, and see, here's last Thursday, and the scar from Tuesday, here's me mam's death, and me child's birth, and here the great shining earth and how all of us interlock in some way or another, and from one to the other pass the tome of Living, and in our neighbors buff our petty human mirrors and scry What's Next.

The sun shines a great spotlight on the dingy parts; you can see, and your fellow commuter too, the broken bits, and then the shyness snaps closed like an armor round the unmentionables which are always wadded in lonely corners when the company arrives, and the one good piece of china brought out so Jimmy in six doesn't see, sometimes it's a toilet, lad.

No poets were born in the sun.

London has stabled a fine mess of them, and loosed them unbroken into the world, and in their hearts you'll not find a single fine July day; you'll spy no errant Midas finger; and the sickness in his fingers and in his heart and in his head which must be solved only by a worse sickness, the pen bleeding all those little half fragments of the feelings he can't touch when there's light to be shone on them- it's the rain conducts the first tentative germs of it, till one day he coughs, and coughs again, frantically, riding out his spasms with the poor old pen, and a truth is born.

The roundness of the world was surely discovered in the rain.

So in the rain he probes round for his anger, and finds: it's not near so large now as his longing, which has itself filled him to the tip toes.

He sends the video of himself acting the jackass on that stage, no note, just the video, and Kol, God bless him, he's got no chill, as the internet kids say nowadays, he answers in precisely four minutes, the second the video resounds its last _kclick_ :

 **this is going to haunt you** , he says.

You don't know the precise shape of happiness, no matter how many times you've felt its swelling before.

It's always going to take up a different space in you, and come as a stranger to your heart, who will recognize it anyway.

The rain pisses on him.

His fag is ruined and his hat soggy and the boots are filled with that mucky _sshl sshl_ of the Particularly Shite Day with which any Irishman is well acquainted and when one of the coaches passes humming along the street it douses the sidewalks like a great tail slap from Melville's monster and he is soaked clean through to the nipples which, immortal or no, are still not exactly admiring of this sudden turn of bollocks-shriveling events.

And he smiles like a stupid asshole.

* * *

Dave closes out a friend's club one night, and lets him smoke in the office, on account of the friend recently conducting himself like a festering cock.

Dave's words.

He is writing little bits of himself down, as sometimes he does when all his books have risen in his soul and come knocking at his brain, so plop plop plop, he's slapping pieces of himself down on the page, and Dave wants to know, is it a love poem he's writing, and he tells him yes, Ma, and knocks off something quick:

 **Roses are red,**

 **Violets are blue,**

 **Stop being nosy**

 **And fuck you**

"I hope your next piss burns," Dave tells him, but fondly as only a friend can, and he flicks ash at him, kindly, and sits back in his chair.

The telly is playing BBC News in the corner; he reels in the ears automatically go searching after the little voices, and taps his fag again, clicking one of his heels against the other and seeing, is there a rhythm in that, can he from all the little minutiae of this office assemble something profound, they say a poet must have breathed the air of his creation after all, felt the texture and the truth of it, stumbled first-hand upon the knowledge which his pen is to impart to his reader, so he thinks, how do you slot in the telly and the window which pisses a steady stream of storm aged three days, and the coil of the one graying curl above Dave's ear, and then the ears snag on the program which Dave has just turned up, and he looks up from his page.

He taps the fag into the ashtray.

They eye one another savagely for a moment, himself and the screen, and then he says, "Ah, turn that off", and hunches over his page where the straggly little words won't judge him for the sudden paleness in his dead old cheeks.

"Terrible what's happening to those Yanks," Dave says, edging the volume up a few more notches.

He looks up into Klaus' face, and he thinks the man must spot him all the way over here, on the other side of the Atlantic.

"Did you believe in them, before all this came out?" Dave asks.

"No."

"I've always known there's something out there. Did I tell you one time, my sister, she came home bleeding from the neck, but not shaken up, like you'd think someone would be after that sort of attack, she was all blank, it was so strange, she couldn't even remember what had-"

"Dave," he says, and cracks the pencil in his hand.

Dave, still in his Sheila eyeliner, blinks at him, and frowns. "What's the matter with you?"

"Just turn it off, all right?" he snaps, and the tension in his voice or in his shoulders or the great big something which has suddenly sprung up between them clouts Dave so you can see him physically pull back from it, just a little, and the telly stops mid-word.

They stare at one another.

He feels the sweat pebble up on his hands and the slick of it down his neck and he is suddenly magicked back to his bachelor's bed with the twisted sheets and the cast-aside pillow where on his worst nights he fights, with a sleepwalker's fury, the unseen foe all children must combat till they have been shown by the good brave Father the closet is only a closet, only he doesn't understand, the good brave Father, as it's his story and his child's story and sure nothing bad can happen when the hero still has the blood thump thumping in his veins and the surging of the life all through the warm and throbbing bits of him- he doesn't understand, what the child has sensed is just what the Father has forgotten.

He breathes until his hand opens round the broken pencil.

"Tim, oh Timmy," Dave says, just like his da must have. "It's all right. Fuck those demons. You can stay at my flat. We can string crucifixes round the whole place. They wouldn't get at you, love."

And he thinks, oh, he thinks, he forgot for a little while, that just because a man is patient with you, just because he's tender, he's enamored of your surface, it doesn't mean he wants to see all the mucky insides.

He stubs out his fag in the tray. "Well, what if they're not all...what if they're not all-"

Dave interrupts him with a snort, Heavenly Father Preserve Me From the Twenty-One and Under look firmly in place. "Bad? Come off it; you've been reading too much _Twilight_ lately. Read your countrymen, love. Bram Stoker, now he knew what he was talking about."

"That's not what I was going to say. I just think…they're not people, Dave. So maybe they're not good by our standards, but history's spent it's whole long life chipping away at the conscience and remolding it and shaping it so each society has his own version of what's right and wrong. They could have their own sort of moral code, so. Some of them. They could have some human bits in them you can still touch."

"Have you not watched the telly?" Dave asks him, but cushioning the question, so his young and obviously addled heart doesn't take the full brunt of it, all at once.

"Yes," he says, and there's the sick misery in him when you know in the depths of you to end the conversation now, and equally is your awareness bristly with the certainty that it'll be had out one way or another.

"Well."

"They could still be men, somewhere."

"Tim."

"They were once, and they had love in them. You don't think it passes out of a man just because he dies, do you?"

"Yes," Dave replies, but he's not mean about it. "You only get one chance at being human, and understanding what that is. These things are just…meat, Tim."

He does forget sometimes: the queers don't want him either.

* * *

 **2014, Alexandria**

She likes it when the boys come and kneel at her feet, as they should. Some of them know her; some are drawn by the instinctive significance which all mobs are assigned.

Across the room, her brother is smiling because people expect him to.

She has not often seen another smile on his face.

He is smoking something and dealing cards to Enzo, who tosses back each shot Caroline lines up in front of him: one, two, three, and the stubbled throat flexes and her brother flicks the end of his cigarette at Enzo, and someone at her feet wants to know: was she alive when the library was just fresh-birthed.

She was alive when her brother was born, and she must have cradled his tiny head, and brushed the afterbirth from his hair, but she does not remember.

She does remember: he was going to meet a girl, and love her not half so much as his sister, and plant babies in her belly and die years after her husband mounded her own virgin grave, so she could stand it.

He balances an empty drink glass on his head, and his drunken audience roars.

The club lights flash overhead.

In 1915, what Kol would not know and she already did was that he already loved the Irish boy.

What he did know was how it would end.

She thinks, sometimes, of finding the little Irish boy and luring him gently to her hand; love is not particularly sexual. And so her brother will know: love as he needs it will never live inside anything that young. The Irish boy is just as pathetically unlovable as her brother; anyone can see it in his eyes. They are easily snared, these types of boys, who carry their shortcomings on their sleeves and their stupid, malleable hearts in their eyes.

She would know.

Kol flicks something at Caroline, who is drunk and jovial with it, and when the little knot comes to her throat, and hardens again somewhere in her belly, she thinks, Kol, oh Kol-not her either.

You see, Nik has claimed everyone first.

She first noticed it when Kol was five, and their mother did not love him equally. She loved none of her children nearly so much as she loved herself; but the youngest (for this was in the pre-Henrik days which are muzzy with those prehistoric fogs of early youth) was an afterthought, and what secret she saw in her mother's eyes which she shared unknowingly with poor oblivious Nik she did not pass along to her smallest son. Elijah and Finn were Father's successes, and she the only daughter; so they were parceled out anything which could be spared from Mother's ego.

She thinks Kol first noticed it when he was seven, and their mother had to try just a little harder for what affection she conjured easily for the others.

Nik never loved him imperfectly.

She thinks that's the great tragedy: Nik loved him best of them all.

He is laughing now, perhaps a little more genuinely this time.

Tim walks in the front door.

He has his hat pulled down over his face, so the eyes are shadowed, and the nose practically a suggestion, but you can spot the clunky behemoth and his grotesque old rags anywhere.

He has terrible posture. He always wants, she can tell, to cram himself into a smaller space, to take up less notice: to provoke no wandering eyes.

Kol hasn't seen him yet; he has a handful of cards, and one of Caroline's shots, which has not been acquired peacefully, if the girl's shouts are anything to judge by.

She can tell the precise moment Tim spots him.

The shoulders lock and he puts both hands in his pockets and he smiles with the helpless love of any child who doesn't understand someday, it's not going to feel like that when it takes up all the room in your chest, and she thinks perhaps she'll fuck him after all, so she can show Kol, didn't she say- it's always going to be her or no one.

And then her brother turns round.

Caroline, who has no sense of propriety, the twit, has spotted Tim over Kol's shoulder, and with a shriek jabbed her finger toward the bar where he is hovering, scratching his neck and gathering his courage.

It's not what her brother was expecting at all; he is, for one long moment, entirely dumbstruck.

He stands up, reflexively.

"Meeee! I did this! I made them husbands again!" Caroline giggles into Enzo's neck, which at the moment is the only thing holding her up, and her brother stares across the club, and she thinks: oh, Nik.

Maybe if they had loved Kol the way this stupid, silly young twit is looking at him.

* * *

Caroline must first be extracted from Tim, who is in a mild panic over her sudden and inebriated hug.

"Darling, let go; you're making him nervous."

"She's all right," Tim says, and awkwardly pats her back.

She has buried her face in his chest, and must now be in the process of smearing over his shirt the myriad drinks of unknown pink origin which she knocked back two to his every beer, but Tim is altogether polite about it, and even smiles a little, which takes him by surprise, right in the guts.

"Do you need to go back to the hotel?" Tim asks her. "I can walk you."

"She'll be all right," Enzo cuts in. "Couple of glasses of water and her metabolism will sort out the rest. Good to see you again, mate."

"Right." Tim shakes his hand. "Are you sure?" he asks Caroline again. "Are you feeling all right?"

"You are a gentleman and a scholar, Tim!" she blasts into his ear, and flinches back an inch or so of space between them, which eases Tim's shoulders. "You guys should go do it." She pats Tim's cheek messily, clipping his mouth and the side of his nose, and with the index finger of her free hand gesturing between the two of them. "You know. _It_ ," she whispers, and is pulled from Tim by Enzo, who slings his arm round her shoulders and rests his chin on the top of her head.

"Let's leave them to it, all right, Gorgeous? Come on." He jerks his head back toward their table, to which Bekah has suddenly moved and lounges now pretending she has seen and is affected by none of this. "Come sit with me, all right?"

"Don't let her wander off by herself. There are- there were- I mean, at least when I was here- you know, back in the 60s- there were…hunters," Tim says with that sudden skip in his voice which indicates he has suddenly noticed everyone has fixed their undivided attention on him, and he stands unwilling in the stage light of their scrutiny, which sweats out the nerves along his collar. "Just…you know. She's only new. Don't let her…step out alone. Not at night."

"Thanks!" Caroline chirps, waving to him as Enzo pulls her away.

"I think they're going to do it," she shouts to Enzo, at a volume she seems to be of the impression is in fact a gossipy whisper.

They stand for a moment in the sudden vacuum of her absence, where there is only the thumping of the music between them, and that communal sweat of the dancers.

In his right pocket, Tim's hand stirs the pocket watch; the clasp thunders into its notch, and loosens with a shriek.

He smells faintly of tobacco; so he's smoked recently, but showered off his nerves and changed into a new shirt, and tarted himself up subtly with the aftershave that rises in a faint mist from the newly naked cheeks, which he must have scraped no more than an hour or so earlier, so that his face is in its infant apple stages of health, when the cheeks glow with uncontaminated youth.

His belly flops, and struggles to turn over, and all his astringent feelings pack suddenly his tight throat, which wants him to know: he fussed over the shirt, and the lay of his bangs, and that unfamiliar aftershave with which he never bothers so he could bridge the four month gap newly handsome.

His boots are polished, and the suspenders new.

The hat, of course, is perpetual, but he's patched it again, and beaten what dust he must have collected through Egyptian miles from the brim, and cocked it precisely rather than squashed it down unthinkingly.

"Nice weather," Tim says, clearing his throat, and balancing one of the shiny boots on its toe, so his eyes can watch the skating of the sole along the floorboards. "Not as hot as I thought it'd be."

"It cools down a bit at night."

"Right. I remember that." He clears his throat again, and yanks at the cap.

"Do you want a drink? They cater to vampires here, so if you're feeling hungry, you can get something with blood in it."

"Ah, I'm all right. Had a snack on the way over."

He puts his hands in his pockets.

Tim rolls his sleeves a little further past his elbows, careful turns of the crisp cuffs which are unmarred, and must have been ironed by a compelled hotel employee, if what he remembers of Tim's ironing skills are anything to judge by.

"Let's go for a walk. I can feel Caroline's eyes boring into my head," he says, and leads Tim out into the street.

You will see by the walls Alexandria is being slowly reclaimed by the sea; the brine which salts each fresh breath has chiseled the flats, and from the businesses taken its tentative bites; there is a mastication here, there, there, where each crumbling corner sighs, and to its fate relents itself a little more each year; perhaps hourly, if you have with his eyes the foresight to see the minute beginnings of the next long and dawdling crack.

There are still, in this district, noisy clusters of locals all along the streets and in the doorsteps of the coffee shops, smoking and dining into the early hours. A woman carrying a large basket smiles her way past the pasty-faced tourists, and adjusts her head scarf.

Tim begins to fiddle with his pocket watch once more, and when this does not soothe whatever roil cramps his belly, he takes the packet of cigarettes from his vest and taps them against his hand.

The wind is tentative tonight; he can see it rouse the hair at the nape of Tim's neck, and not much else.

They are jovially invited into no less than half a dozen coffee shops by proprietors and customers who are fascinated with Tim's height and excessive whiteness, and in accented English and then (when they are answered in their own tongue) delighted Arabic, beckon him forth and are politely declined.

"I can't stand the coffee here," Tim confesses when they are out of earshot. "All the little grounds. Stick in your teeth." The cigarettes rapid fire against his palm, but are not selected.

"You should have seen the look on Caroline's face the first time she had it. She was so proud of herself- she ordered it in terrible Arabic, and then nearly spat it out. I may have neglected to warn her."

Tim sneaks a smile at him. "You're an ass."

"You wouldn't have recognized me if I weren't. And then what would you have done when you walked into that club? Although I suppose you could have contented yourself with Caroline. You looked a bit chummy in there."

Tim switches the cigarette packet to his other hand. The shop lights mix their palettes on his face, so he is first a startling commingling of orange and green, and then a bruised purple he wears rather reaper-like round his eyes, so any mortal man might for a moment stop and look again at what peeps from beneath the brim. "She's sweet."

"She's been texting you, hasn't she?"

"Oh, all the time. Every day, just about. Sometimes multiple times a day."

"I told her not to."

Tim fishes out one of his cigarettes, and begins to twirl it between his fingers. "It's all right. I don't mind. I got a good laugh, anyway, over how subtle you could tell she thought she was being. 'Today we're here in Albania, here's the address of our hotel and all the clubs and museums we regularly haunt oh and here's our favorite place to eat we're here most days around 1:00 or so and from 3:00 to about 5:00 Kol can be found here here or here or sometimes here. Nice making casual conversation with you!'" He laughs. "She didn't mean any harm by it."

Something squeezes inside him when Tim laughs; if he still had the casual consent of the lover, he'd reach out and brush the jaw line he will admit, just between us girls, as Nik would say, he is ashamed and terrified to have missed with the same sting with which he contemplated the missing brogue, or the fond casualness of Tim's best You Absolute Eejit look.

You miss the insignificant things so the large things which cannot be contemplated take only minuscule pieces from the unsleeping chest: it's only his skinned knuckles which are missing, or the adam's apple which when kissed elicits a ticklish protest.

Who stares into his empty bed and thinks, love, that's what's flown, and swaggers out to meet his day on steady knees, and with functioning if smarting heart?

"Weather's nice," Tim offers. "I mean- I said that before. It's just, I was in London. Before. Awful piss stream of a summer, there."

They have crossed into a residential block, dark and silent, save where here and there a line of laundry whispers in the soft breeze, which seems not to want to intrude, and hushes the hems along to desiccation.

He sticks his hands back in his pockets, and thinks oh darling, darling, you've stoppered _his_ mouth.

He wets his lips, tries again. "You didn't stay in Ireland?"

"Sure for a while so."

Tim scratches at his nose; he has not looked over since his sideways sneak of a smile; the cigarette is magicked from finger to finger with a conjurer's ease. "Well, what have you got yourself up to, then?"

"Nothing particularly special." He eyes the distance between their shoulders, which could be crossed with half a step. It was, since nearly their first meeting, never hard to touch Tim; perhaps it had to be accomplished in levels and pieces, when you first clapped the shoulder, and then flirted the fingers along the arm, so he could be allowed to check his start, and realize, not every man is Nik, but there was from the beginning the inexplicable ease of instant friendship which chooses at whim its hapless victims.

And so he could bump the shoulder with his own, or elbow the side, or with premeditated nonchalance hook the neck in the crook of his arm, so the cheeks were nearly pressing, and the breaths intermingling.

But he supposes that's for Tim to initiate now, when he has breached the faith which any casualty of Nik's places ever thereafter gingerly in the next palms which are expected to crush it.

"What were you doing in London?"

Tim scrunches up his nose, squinting off into the distance.

The cigarette hops from knuckle to knuckle to knuckle. His pre-transition scars are livened by the moon; there is one on nearly every knuckle.

He remembers for a moment what they feel like beneath his lips, and looks away.

"Did you hear about the prime minister?" Tim asks.

"Yes. Suspected IRA involvement. You, I assume?"

"Yeah. Me and some lad from the ranks. Anyway, I popped him and decided to stay on for a bit, lay low till I could see how far the fallout from…your brother was going to reach."

"Did you have any trouble?"

"No. Well." Tim's shoulders shift. "The lad who was with me when we shot Mr. Cameron, he tried to kill me. But that wasn't anything. He was bad at it. You know, I'm all right. I was all right, there in London. Shit weather, but I'm used to that. Fell in with some lads." He scuffs at the road with his boot. Twists his wrist; vanishes the cigarette back into his pack and pockets them all. The big and slightly oafish hands which seem to have never been entirely grown into are slid into the vest pockets, and then the trousers, and then the thumbs hooked once more into the vest, so he can amble along without difficulty, so anyone might pass their eyes unconcernedly over this large but altogether unthreatening man with his casual and open strut.

"Look, lad," Tim says, like it's been punched out of him, and everything inside him tightens for his own oncoming blow.

"Look," Tim says again, and stops, and grips him by the bicep, hard so he can feel the calluses on the fingers, and the sweat in the palm, and the blue eyes are full on him, and oh, he feels it in his throat, his stomach, his toes, his heart, undecided, is suspended between the joyful leap and the miserable plummet, he thinks: you have to know, he didn't mean it.

He was only-

He was only mimicking what he for a thousand years has known and known again.

"I'm sorry for what I said about your brother."

He blinks.

There is a dry scurf which has frozen his tongue not unlike Egypt's eternal struggle between sand and machine; all of the cogs which whirl a man along to his next thought and his subsequent action flounder and lock.

It always comes down to Nik.

What has sat in the pit of him waiting to be expelled when he is tired of carrying its weight- what he has born for all these months is some injustice done his brother, whose feelings are the only ones worth wounding and patching.

What's the use in gentling booze, sex and mirrors, your eternal trifecta, Bekah asked him once when she was being particularly mean. You cannot hurt a hairline nor joust at a chin, and he said, you're only jealous, darling, and winked at himself in the looking glass, so she'd know: he wasn't going to show her where she'd scored.

"Not for what I said," Tim continues, and loosens the hand on his bicep. "That was all true. He's a right cunt, Klaus. You don't know what I'd do to him, if he hadn't nine hundred years on me, and he wasn't your brother. But I said it-" And he looks truly wretched here, like he's been opened down to the worst bits of him: "I said it specifically to hurt you. I don't want to be like that. There's no excuse to act the jackass just because I'm angry or I'm hurt or I'm a monster. Your brother didn't take that responsibility from me when he turned me."

"Oh," he says, numbly.

Tim lets go of him. "What you did- you can't do that again. Ever. I had enough of it from your brother. I know if you're so inclined, I won't have much say in the matter. Sure there's no pretending you couldn't break me over your pinkie finger if you wanted. But I think you're so much better than him."

His throat has thickened so he can barely swallow.

"Now I missed you. In the absolute gayest, Nicholas Sparks way I'm too ashamed to say." He smiles a little, and ruffles the hair at the nape of his neck. "I listened to your voicemail, so I know you did too. I say we stop fumbling along and put it behind us."

He tries to laugh, finds his throat has gone too sticky, looks down at his feet. "I'll need to delete that off your phone."

"I've got a back-up. And I've memorized it." He taps his hat with one finger. "It'll be stored here forever, for those times I need it."

"In my defense, I was very coked up, darling."

"Don't snort and dial, eejit. Next time, hand the phone off to Caroline till you've got your senses back."

They have, in unspoken agreement, started to walk once more. From here, the motorway can be heard, and the sea beyond it, which wades onto invisible shores somewhere beyond the buildings, to lovingly thieve another inch of sand.

He can see the first shimmery glimpse of it when they round the corner of the building on Tim's right.

The city, at this hour ablaze with its nocturnal transactions, weeps into the ocean; you can from here see the resigned melting of the shop signs and the traffic lights and the dusty rooster tails of braking cars into the waves, so you have the stars floating on the waves, and the bright teardrops of Alexandria alongside.

"Can I kiss you?" Tim blurts out several silent moments later, and he feels the kind of smile you cannot help suddenly hurt his cheeks.

"You don't have to ask, Tim."

"Well, you can't just spring it on someone, after four months. Their feelings might have changed."

"That's true." He lifts an eyebrow. "I'm actually straight now."

"Oh really?" Tim asks, and swerves in a little closer, so they are nearly shoulder to shoulder. "Me too. I even slept with a lass while I was in London."

"How was it?"

"I had a grand time. She was absolutely fucking cracked. She threw me into a wall."

He's slammed by this lightness; he can't describe it, he's just buoyant, he wants to throw Tim himself into the wall of the complex behind them and not even grope him, just kiss him until his neck hurts from the height difference, and listen as in some fluttery 'chick lit' to the heart beating underneath his cheek.

"What did you do?" he asks instead.

"You mean what position?"

"When she threw you into the wall, idiot."

"I thought, ah fuck it, and went full in, asshole."

"Did she like it?"

"Of course she did. It's not been that long, you smug fuck."

A sudden gust upsets Tim's hat; he slaps it back down.

"You smell nice. What is that? My Boyfriend Is Incredibly Handsome And I Need To Pull Out All the Stops by Britney Spears?"

"Actually it's Me Boyfriend Is a Shallow Fuck I Better Not Smell Like Airplane and Donkey by Lady Gaga."

He wrinkles his nose. "Why donkey?"

"Never you mind," Tim replies. "You don't need to know everything about me."

"You did grow up on a sheep farm; I won't judge any proclivities. I never did believe that denial about the sheep, by the way."

Tim boots him in the calf with the heel of his boot, a little shuffle and a side kick he takes like a gentleman, so Tim for one moment gets to revel in the sensation of actually landing one of his blows. "Is that what you remember? That discussion about, what was it, the sheep and…clowns, I think?"

"And a penguin, if I'm not mistaken."

"You kicked me off the roof; I remember that."

"It was for your own good, darling." He pockets his hands once more, so his elbows are winged out, and the right brushes Tim's, warm and slightly damp. "Are you going to kiss me, or just keep flirting?"

"Oh, you think you still deserve a kiss?"

"It's not a matter of deserving, darling; it's simply that you can't help yourself, which is hardly your fault."

Tim mimes pulling up his boots, and sloshing through something particularly murky. "Jaysus, it's getting deep in here."

But he does grab him by the collar of his shirt, and pull him back into the shadows, and lean down to brush their noses, and linger there for a moment, as if he's not nervous about closing the distance, and merely aims to tease.

Tim touches his chin, and then his cheeks, and then the forehead, where his bangs are clumped together with his own nerves; his fingers shake; he could be twenty-one again, sick over his sexuality.

He clutches at the broad shoulders in a way that embarrasses him, the shirt crumpling under his nails, underneath the skin jumping in habit from the sharp pricks of the fingers, Tim breathing into his mouth, and when he has pressed their foreheads together whispering, "All right, all right", which is when he notices he's shaking, and with a rush there is the sudden realization of his rattly breath, and the sweating palms come abruptly to him, and the flinching of his belly against Tim's-

Tim peels the nails out of his shoulders, and holds both wrists out in front of him; he kisses right on each pulse point, for a moment keeping them pressed to his mouth even when he's done with them. "Did you really think I might not come back?"

"I wasn't sure. Caroline said you would." He laughs, but it sounds like something else, and he breaks the hold Tim has on his wrists and runs his hands over the smooth cheeks, feels with his thumbs the familiar jaw, and the few stray hairs between the thick brows, touches the hair like you might venture toward something you are yourself afraid of frightening.

"See, you fancy pants dirt-aged know-it-all. You've got to stop and listen to someone else once in a while. I'm stupid for you." Tim leans forward, so their foreheads are again holding one another up. "But not as stupid as you, if you thought I wouldn't eventually find me way here."

"You're just- you're just…I think you might be the first. And you weren't obligated."

Tim pulls him up by the ears to kiss him. "You're not going to talk about yourself like that, all right?"

"Yes," he just sort of breathes out, not quite a word.

"Ask me how I liked London; just because your brother is a literal wolf doesn't mean you can act like you've been raised in the woods by a pack of them, you manner less ass growth."

He laughs in a completely undignified way at that. "How did you like London?"

"I liked it just fine. There's a church you should see out in Greenwich if you haven't already. They call it the Sistine Chapel of the UK. And there are biscuits in Covent Garden- bigger than your fucking cock."

"That's an odd comparison for a biscuit."

"You're the one who's always after comparing it to anything roughly the size of Africa." Tim kisses the corner of his mouth, fisting his shirt collar in both hands. "Now ask me about the lads."

"What were the lads like? Aside from being not nearly as handsome as me."

" _Excellent_ singers. And utter fuck rots right down to the last of them. They made me dance to the _Titanic_ soundtrack."

"I know; I've watched it 312 times." He slides his hands over Tim's where they are still bunched in his collar, and strokes the scarred knuckles; Tim digs into the collar, and the knuckles jump a little beneath his fingers. "You look like a jackass. And I mean that in the most complimentary I-masturbated-all-312-times-to-it kind of way."

"Oh, in between jerking it to the sound of your own voice?"

"Well, I talked myself through it, darling. There's only so much anything else can get me going."

Tim is smiling, and his chest leaps or is squeezed, or perhaps entirely crushed, he doesn't know, but something undoing happens to it, and he says, or rather it is ripped from him, "Come break something with me? And have sex in the ruins?" which is precisely as romantic as he knows how to be, but what he means, what he means-

Tim knows what he means.

"Sure," he agrees, and the cap is relinquished, and set down on his own head, and one of the heavy arms thrown round his neck (the Irish, he is convinced, are comprised of a uniquely dense bone mass of approximately twice the thickness of any normal mortal or his undead inverse); Tim thumps the cap soundly. "Thank God you're short; so I've that, at least."

"Did you mean of perfect proportions? We can't all be the antagonist at the end of Jack's beanstalk."

"Give me back me hat, you shit."

* * *

Enzo mother hens approximately 46 glasses of water into her.

She's decided: she doesn't really mind anymore that he calls her 'gorgeous'.

She's been thinking. She had…all these years with people who were supposed to love her, who were supposed to scrabble past the frail exterior of her, and not care about the tangled inside. They were good people, according to her Bible; none of them lay with a man as he shall lay with a woman; they had the soft underbellies of humans; they were, if not flawless, neither adulterers nor murderers nor blasphemers; and Elena, oh Elena- she was not just sun nor moon nor stars to all the people who were supposed to have something left for her. You can judge someone by that, she used to think: by what reputations and secondhand judgments have formed them from their tenuous middle school clay.

But, see, she's surrounded by murderers. She is, herself, a killer, but that's not unexpected, she was never really the same, she was never really good, she was never really _Elena_. But these murderers, now they- they're kind of exactly what she used to long after when she'd glance around the rush of a mid-noon hallway and think ok, ok- _these_ are friendships, right, where you don't have to scramble for their halfhearted bones-

Ok, like, she doesn't mean to cry about it, not here where people actually pay attention, and it's selfish of her to take up all this _feeling_ , when others might have weights on their chests, but she would have looked once at Kol and Enzo and Rebekah -she still, sometimes, with her small and petty human heart, thinks, but they're so _awful_ \- and she'd have thought, this is what justice looks like, to hunt them from their beds, and gun, stake, mow them down in the streets.

But Elena called, and so Stefan missed her mother's death, and maybe she got a conciliatory text, she doesn't even remember, but he wasn't there, and he wouldn't have cared to be, if she stood to the one side of him and held out her arms and to the other posed Elena with her next glossy hairstyle, and you know- she wouldn't even have to cry. She wouldn't have to hurt. She just gets to exist, and have everything flung at her.

And Matt who finally lowered himself to screw his not-Elena consolation- he might have held her the way Rebekah did, and made it about her, until Elena crooked her finger and said, remember _my_ mother, remember _my_ pain, and he'd have said, sorry, Care.

"Hey, hey," Enzo says, and leans across the table to take her chin, with the kind of gentleness you would say, a boy like this, a thing like this- he can't manage it. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing."

He tilts his head down to look up from beneath his eyebrows. "You're not as good a liar as you are cute." He settles back into the cushions of the couch across from her. "Do you want me to take you back to the hotel?"

"No." She wipes her eyes. "Sorry. I'm an emotional drunk."

"Don't worry about it, love."

"Don't call me that."

"Sorry; habit of my people. We'll get you a snack, all right? That'll perk you right up, gorgeous."

She dabs at her eyes again. "I don't feel like eating anyone right now."

"That's fine. What do you want to do? I can't let such a pretty girl sit here and cry over whatever it is she's bothered by." He nods his head toward the door. "You're not worried about Tim coming back, are you? Kol will vanish for a few days and shag him blind, and then he'll be back. He's not going to forget about _you._ "

"You go blind by masturbating, not having sex. Get your weird old puritanical hang-ups right," she tells him crisply, and he smiles, and knocks his knee against hers under the table. "And no, it doesn't have anything to do with that. I'm happy for them."

"There we are. And she's back in queen mode where she belongs."

She picks up her glass, and stirs up the dregs of it, which is mostly ice, but where some alcohol must still lurk. "Yeah, you like those kinds of girls, don't you? By the way, you totally have a crush on Rebekah. She doesn't know."

There's a little thoughtful squint to his eyes now. "She doesn't want to."

"Don't worry; she's not repulsed by you or anything. She's been weird this whole trip. I mean, weirder than normal. She's got this unresolved whatever with Kol, and she and I still haven't really had it out over these weirdo lesbian dreams she was _obviously_ sending me when we were still back in New Orleans because she's been mostly avoiding me ever since. She doesn't know how to be somebody's friend." She takes a long draw on her straw, and gets this low-key disgusting mouthful of watered-down Sex On the Beach. Probably. She thinks that's what she had; she's not long removed from the spinny part of drunkenness.

"Who's this 'Nik' who manages to work his way every so often into the conversation, and instantly ruin everyone's mood?"

"Rebekah and Kol's older brother. My…something. Boyfriend. I don't know. He's like…a gajillion, just like them, so, I mean, 'boyfriend' seems like kind of a weird word, especially when you're talking about literally the strongest, most powerful, biggest jerk in the whole entire world. He's a jerk."

"You said that." Enzo tips his knee into hers again. "Do you want to dance?"

"No."

"Do you want to complain about your boyfriend?"

She rolls her eyes. "You do not have enough time left on this mortal coil for me to list all my grievances with him."

"Is he why you were crying? I'll knock his head in for you next time you see him, gorgeous."

"And get yours pulled off."

"You'd protect me," he tells her, and gives her the sassiest smile, which just kind of maybe brightens everything a little, and she decides, you know what, you know what- she would.

* * *

She doesn't see Kol for three days; Rebekah is, as usual, scarce; Enzo does try to coax her out now and again, but she's a little melancholy, and decides her room is best for this sort of mood, and so spends these three days cussing the hotel's kind of sucky WiFi, and following the news.

Klaus is lurking somewhere, and not currently mugging for any cameras, but there are reports of scattered violence throughout Europe and the east coast of the U.S., which seem to her more speculation than anything. There are as many reports questioning the authenticity of Klaus' stunt as there are generally panicking over it.

Tumblr believes in him; they are organizing a worldwide trend.

She logs off in disgust, and leaves another dangerously sweet voicemail on his phone.

He's not going to reply, she knows; one day, when she is empty of all Klaus-related thoughts, and stands in awe of some ancient pillar or desert sunset, she'll suddenly feel this tingling along her spine, and in the nape of her neck that eerie alighting of the ancient senses, which perch with a thunderous whisper at her ear to warn, something's coming, and she will turn, and find him watching her the way a baby for the first time encounters any new and wondrous thing.

But it doesn't hurt to remind him, she's still here, she's still pissed, she is still going to make him work _so_ freaking hard for it.

Kol kicks open her door on the third day, and whips inside, a laptop in his hands. "Caroline, I have to show you these cat memes," he says. "She's not naked, Tim," he calls over his shoulder, and invites himself onto her bed.

Tim slinks into the doorway a moment later; he doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands. He aborts what's kind of an adorably dorky wave, and stuffs his hands instead inside his pockets. "Sorry. I would have warned you. But."

"He's a super strong freak who throws a tantrum if you don't just watch the stupid youtube video?"

"That'd be about it, yeah."

"It wasn't a tantrum, darling. That man was hogging the urinal."

"Oh my _God_ , like you can't hold it!"

"Look at this one- it thinks it's a rabbit." He shoves the computer under her nose. She holds onto her irritation for a moment, but seriously, it's trying to awkwardly hop alongside its bunny friend, and as much as she hates to admit it, he has pretty consistently amazing taste in memes.

There is a tug on one of her curls.

Kol steals her favorite pillow, and props it behind his head, and like a complete savage, puts his boots on her bed covers. "Did you miss me?"

"No."

"We were fucking. I wanted to invite you. Tim is a wet blanket." He tilts his head toward Tim, who is still hovering in her doorway, and squints at him. "It is 'wet blanket', right? Why am I asking you; you once told me a woman had the 'trots' for her cum volcano of a strapping love interest."

"I don't even want to know the context for that." She clicks one of the minimized windows. "Kol!"

"Right. I found that this morning. It's a vintage pornography blog. I'm actually in a few of the pictures- they were taken around 1907, if I remember correctly." He leans forward over her shoulder, resting his chin on it. "You can see here-"

"Yes, I can!" she snaps, and closes out of the window.

Tim is trying not to laugh; he's not very good at it.

Kol flops back with the heaviest sigh she has ever heard, which is so totally not drama queen-y at all, and says, "Don't be boring, darling. Get dressed."

"Why?"

"Tim and I are going to rob some drug lords. We thought you might want to come."

"Do you guys ever go on a normal date? Like, he takes you to the movies and you share a bag of popcorn and sit in the back row so you can ignore the movie and just make out with each other? You should try it sometime. It's fun. You don't get shot at."

Kol makes 'ew' face at her. "Do we eat everyone else in the theater?"

"No."

"Do we have sex in the projector booth? Does anyone see my ass pressed against the window, and have to cover their children's horrified but intrigued eyes?"

"No. You just sit there in the dark and hold hands and kiss at the boring parts."

Kol cocks his head, and bounces one of his ankles where he has crossed them over one another, raining sand and probably little bits of people onto her sheets. "How am I supposed to know when the boring parts are? It all sounds boring to me. We cut our teeth on blowjobs in a confessional booth. I'd be letting him down if he didn't get to admire me in action. Anyway," he says, and because he is boundary-free since 1003, and he knows she thinks this is so completely the grossest atrocity any man or monster can inflict on fellow mortal or beast, he leans forward and licks the side of her face. "Get dressed. You might want to do it in your bathroom, unless you want to watch. We're going to have sex in your bed."

She pulls the sheets over his face and presses down until he stops laughing.

* * *

When the sun touches the windshield and in one nuclear blast for a moment erases the street, the hood of the car, the limp and untouched windshield wipers which for years have bided their time, she shades her eyes.

She feels the jerky braking of the car which Kol cannot gentle to an easy halt but must instead stomp into submission.

There is the hissing of Tim's cigarette, loud and staticy in her ears.

He's cranked the window so you can feel the coastal wind touch your cheek with ancient Tutankhamen fingers and from your springy curls wick the last of this morning's long and tepid shower.

The sun has slid off the hood of the car, and in the middle of the road spread its fabled water.

The boys pop their doors in exact synchronization, which she's almost positive they have planned.

Tim flicks his cigarette.

Kol cracks his neck.

She decides: all eyes are going to be hers when she steps out, and unwinds the scarf from her head, so the curls are loosed, and the collarbones bared.

There's something about a pink sundress.

It is supposed to wrap this thing of cotton fluff, something insubstantial, something non-threatening, something that drinks exclusively fruit-flavored alcohol and twirls the curls on unconcerned fingers because, oh, thinking is for those strange withered creatures whose noses live inside philosopher's tomes.

There are, lined along the freeway, pulled off into the shoulder dust, several cars where you can see, in the driver's seats or sometimes sprawled over the hoods, the junkies already hazy with their addictions.

The truck at the front of this little convoy of vice has its back doors open, and a man in traditional Bedouin dress standing beside it, his robe gently flapping, his very large gun against his chest.

She concentrates for a moment on the flapping of that robe, the gentle whup whup whup of the wind whistling its white folds, how the hand slides on that gun, the moist slip of the fingers, the subtle crunching of the grains beneath his boots.

She can taste the far ocean on her tongue: there's something dead in the nearest of the waves.

"Salaam aleikum," she calls to the man.

In a society like this, where a woman lives quietly beneath the all-seeing eye of Husband who if not her keeper is still at least a minor deity, Zeus the lowercase, she is eyed and then dismissed. What use is there dealing with a woman when she has a man on either side?

"Rude," she says, and puts on her sunglasses.

So, she's been picturing this all the way out here.

Kol is completely unhinged, and Tim probably at least three quarters so. They're flashy, drama-seeking, they like to think about their penises and how big they're gonna' seem when, post-head stomping, they have reaffirmed their mannish manness.

So she was thinking.

She could sink herself down on the hood of this car and cross her newly shaved and moisturized legs and with the cigarette she stole from Tim lean back and just sort of femme fatale to the one hundredth, and somewhere Klaus, he's gonna' just _know_ , and feel a sudden snugness in his pants.

"Salaam aleikum," Kol says to the man, and you can tell, even from the back of his head, how charming his smile is.

The man rattles off a stream of Arabic she can't follow at all.

Tim puts his hands casually in his pockets, where she knows he has at least one pistol.

She touches her butt primly to the hood of the car and its inhabitants blink vaguely and snort another line and she can smell, in the wind, that moist underbelly of a good oil-slicked fish dying on the coals.

"Let's get fish after this," she suggests, and crosses her legs.

Tim turns and gives her this little knowing look that she can feel all the way to the cigarette suddenly burning in her pocket, and tosses her his lighter.

She was totally going to remember to jack that before the shooting started.

Movie smoking is the quick tick of the lighter and the hiss of the flame and that blissful smile of the well-drawn breath, but what they don't tell you is that holy _crap_ , this shit actually _burns_ , you get the cigarette all right between your lips and for a moment you think this isn't going to be so bad, there is the faint aroma of the tobacco and the fascinating novelty of the paper on your teeth and then the first obliterating inhale, which imparts no church bliss but rather revolts the startled throat and flinches the panicking lungs and what comes out is this undignified cat hack that births no sticky fur ball but contorts your face all the same and then everyone is turning and staring at you and you're cute, you're cute, you saw that in their faces when you rolled on out of the bathroom with the cheeks painted and the hair coiffed, do something ladyish so they can remember, oh right, she is beauty, she's grace, she doesn't even poop-

"Ack. _Hch_ ," she says, and everyone blinks.

Tim, who, ancient games of penis footsie with her boyfriend aside, is pretty ok, she guesses, punches the man right in his face.

The gun jerks around.

Tim head butts him and stomps the shin bone so there's this ugly crack and the man reels and the rifle lets off a rattly burst that stitches the hood of the car, and she screams and flings herself over the side.

Kol yanks the rifle out of his hands and just freaking flattens the man's nose with it.

And there's the delayed screaming from the junkies and the hot dust in her nose and suddenly the blast of fuel reek from the ill-maintained shitcan first in line and dimly she realizes the cigarette still smokes in her hand and there's a stinging in her elbow and the dress has probably seen its last look-at-me flounce, and she rolls as another shot grazes the rock just beside her left ear.

She scrambles to her feet.

"On your 10:00!" Tim yells, and throws her a rifle.

She fumbles it for a moment and then jams down on the trigger and she's never shot an automatic before, so when the thing just comes _alive_ in her hands, she startles a shot into the hood of the car to her right and at least half a dozen into the robed man who rushes with his own rifle aimed, and there's the leap of the warm blood which taunts the bare tips of her fangs from her gums and that moist rush of all the guy's…storage parts loosening down his legs and into the sand, and she swings the barrel around and with steadier hand this time taps two bullets into the chest of another robed apparition.

The truck starts.

Tim leans around the corner of it and his own rifle barks a long stream of shots into the gut of a man who comes blazing around the corner of the truck bellowing Arabic and from his own gun discharging several messy shots which, by pure fortune, hit Tim in the leg and the left shoulder, and then Tim grabs the roof of the truck and hoists himself into the back, onto the heaped bricks of cocaine, and the truck gives a lurch and she hurtles herself in after and it is immediately clear Kol is driving the second the wheels catch and the truck jolts back onto the road, fishtailing.

"Slow down!" she yells at him, and he accelerates.

* * *

They take her out to the White Desert to stand in this eerie dead snow and to realize beside the towering rock formations man's insignificant dwarfism, at which Mother Nature probably just laughs and laughs.

You can, in a spring meadow or even a December wood, if you shut your eyes and stretch each supernatural sense to its limit, hear how the trees live, and the snow crackles with its own unseen static of shifting molecules, and the new April shoots breach the surface like reluctant infants to test the wind and the rotation of the sun which gently parents them into the world.

But for miles and miles there's the sand and the silent rocks and dumb Nature unsure what the hell to say.

Kol wears her scarf around his head and looks way less ridiculous than he should; Tim tells her the Bedouin call this place Wadi Gazar, 'Valley of the Carrots' thanks to the shapes of some of the rock formations, which Kol insist look like penises, because he is most definitely a deviant.

"I'm pretty sure you see penises everywhere," she tells him, and gently (really) bullies Tim into showing her how to frame her pictures better, how to set her f stops and decide upon her lighting, because he's sensitive or at least nice and probably spent his formative immortal decades treading the earth thinking Deep Dostoyevsky Thoughts and practicing broody artist stuff like the perfecto summer sunset shot.

When she flicks back through her last few pictures, they are full of thumbs and overexposure and the awkward halves of rock stacks amateurishly chopped.

"You suck at this!"

"Sorry."

"Why didn't you tell me that before you helped me take all these pictures!"

He looks to Kol for help. "Well, it's hard to say no when you're barking at me like that."

"I asked politely!" she insists, deleting the last ten shots from her camera.

"Ok," he says in this tone she can tell he probably thinks is really subtle, but she can sooo totally smell sarcasm from a good football field away- she, after all, excuse you, buffed that particular Right, Bitch voice to absolute and shining perfection- and she stares at him until he puts his hands in his pockets and looks appropriately terrified.

As the sun settles uncertainly, always deciding on the fly, should he sit here or there, the rocks brighten; the on looking eyes are wounded; in first pink and then orange hues she has never seen struck from mute stone the formations suddenly live: you see what flourishes here is not the million and one little voices of mossy Ireland stretching forever its breathing roots, but the new inventions of soft rose and warm peach.

She sits down in the sand with her chin in her hands, stupid with it.

She was going to live and breed and die in that one small southern town.

And this was here all along, there was a whole world of vast white oceans that whisper beneath the feet that she was never even going to imagine.

Oral sex, Kol says, pointing at one of the rock formations.

Tim thinks it's a bird.

"Seriously? It's a cloud."

"It's definitely oral sex. See, you can see the woman's head-"

Tim flicks him in the face with the end of the scarf.

"It's not oral sex, you pervert. Take a picture of me with it," she tells Kol, and goes to pose beside it, best cheerleader grin and Vanna White arms, but at the last minute Kol tosses the camera to Tim and in one blinding whirl has crossed the sand to push her head down toward what, ok, maybe does look just a teensy bit like a penis, and what she has to commemorate the moment is a slightly blurry snapshot of her going down on a ten foot rock dick.

And then both of them run along ahead to the next formation, giggling like hyenas, because _boys_ , and the pieces of iron pyrite strewn everywhere underfoot are struck like matches by the sun, and for a moment the whole flat wasteland blazes.

Somewhere over the hills there are the sounds of laboring 4x4s shuttling tourists along to their safaris and the snorting of loaded camels who jingle with unseen wares, and she touches one of the stacks and thinks, a thousand years ago, kings stroked these rough knobs and gritty crevices and were gone, and the wind, unknowing, slowly labored over its forever nascent art.

She smiles.

She doesn't think about Klaus.

* * *

They are all walking past a cluster of hotels when from Alexandria's never-ending congestion a new commotion suddenly breaks, and she turns around to frown at all the horns blowing and blowing.

"What's that?"

"It's a wedding," Kol replies, and points ahead to one of the hotels around which is clustered a large group of women in their shimmery belly dance skirts and the fog-like veils which cleverly spice the plain human faces. "That's a Zaffa." He clutches Tim's arm in this sudden spasm of childish exhilaration that's kind of cute. "Let's crash it."

Somehow, he has stolen them all formal clothing by the time the bride and groom step free of their car. Tim comes out of the hotel in a tux, Kol wetting down little pieces of hair that have escaped around his ears like he's his mother.

Enzo looks her up and down, and does that pervy guy thing with his eyebrows.

Rebekah looks sourly at her, which she takes to mean she thinks her dress is better.

She's wearing this ankle-length red number with a scooped neckline whose last inhabitant is probably dead, and which fits her perfectly.

She's really getting a little creeped out by how accurately the brothers Mikaelson are able to pin down her exact hip and boob dimensions.

The nearby Zaffa explodes into sudden motion; she looks over to see that the bride and groom have reached them, and stand now in a profusion of suddenly whirling dancers and drummers, who cheer them along toward the hotel with raised and exuberant Arabic. The little cymbals the belly dancers flourish on sinuous and coordinated arms chime and chime again; the drummers strike their approach in synchronized 4/4ths.

There's the happy fever in the bride's cheeks and the groom beams like he has only just found out about this thing called smiling and is for his first thrilled time trying it out, and he turns his new wife under his arm, her skirt ballooning, and then the dancers and the drummers all converge on them once more, and the parade jingles and thunders one snail's geriatric inch forward.

"Why are they moving so slowly?" she asks Kol.

"That's the point. They walk as slowly as they can; sometimes the Zaffa can take an hour to reach the reception hall." He bends and kisses her hand and gives her a smirk like the smooth jerk he is, and then he takes her arm, leaving Rebekah to Enzo.

The Zaffa continues unabated behind them; someone blows another car horn, and the drummers boom their stormy response, and the delicate tinkling of the dancer's cymbals stir the stagnant afternoon, and they sweep into the hotel like they own it.

There is a staircase spiraling up and up and up until she can no longer follow it, and through the center of it a whole vast column of lights, the shivering crystal caging, fly-like, the warm amber lights that are cut and cut again by all the bodies flowing past, and beyond the main entrance the waiters in the reception hall hurriedly tap tapping in their shiny shoes from table to kitchen and the singer warming her voice on the stage.

When the Zaffa finally reaches the hall, the bride and groom are seated in these two cushy chairs at the front of the room and the waiters dart around pressing glasses in everyone's hands, and all around her are faces red with celebration and there is one convulsive shout from at least a hundred happy throats, and then everyone tips back their drinks and shouts forward what she assumes are their best wishes to the beaming couple.

The rosy-colored drink shivers down her throat in one slimy ice cream lump and she feels this one long winter spear reach her guts, and ice her spine.

She crunches some of the leftover crystals between her teeth.

The bride and groom switch their rings from their right hands to their left.

And then the singer leans into her microphone and this brilliant, smoky voice just freezes the whole room except for these two whose faces have forgotten that sorrow is a thing, that for all their years and years they will stumble on and be forced to carry it, and for one tiny moment, she shuts her eyes and remembers what his big artist's hands feel like on her, the careful fingers and the callused palms and not so very far above her the smile which she always swears he learned exactly the moment she stepped into his bright and shining ballroom.

The couples' first dance concludes; the guests rush the floor.

Enzo brings back a plate from the table piled with a bunch of little appetizers she doesn't recognize.

He fires them into her mouth from a few feet away, badly, so she has to dart and lunge and jump to catch them, and whatever they are, they pop on her tongue and flood her mouth with tart cheese and some unknown meat glistening with its fryer-fresh grease; she laughs and has to cup the tenth one half-chewed against her chin.

There is shouting and cheering from where the bride and groom can barely be glimpsed through the crowd, and then one preparatory heave, two, and she sees the groom fly ceiling-bound, and land once more, laughing, in his friends' arms.

Rebekah is holding court with three men who cling, dumbstruck, to her every word.

The guests sweat into their best spins and footwork; she sees three men with their arms around one another's waists, failing at a really awkward kickline and laughing so hard their cheeks stream.

She is absorbed into the group of women near the stage who shout at her in English and are perfectly happy to let some gawky foreigner join in on the dance they laughingly try to teach her, all their hands joined above their heads and the hips saucily vibrating like the belly dancer who has now joined the singer and in time to the words gestures with the long brown arms and flirts the kohl-smeared eyes which you see and then don't as the hair jumps and then floats gracefully back onto the shoulders.

The groom is thrown again.

She is laughing so hard she can barely stand as she twirls under first one girl's arm and then another's, and so dorkishly she doesn't even care takes her arms out to either side in this totally clumsy imitation of the belly dancer and jiggles her exotic snake arms; the girls cheer her.

The groom's friends make another toss, and she sees as she jumps around in time to the music that it's Kol this time.

He makes them do it six times in a row, waving to her each time he gets up there, and with his hands urging the crowd's cheers even higher.

Enzo takes over from the girls when there is a brief break in the music.

He spins her so fast even her enhanced equilibrium tilts nervously, and the room sways, she sees the windows quiver through drunken eyes, and then he picks her up and does this totally cheesy Dirty Dancing twirl that makes her laugh so hard she can only gasp into his suit jacket, which, BTW, buddy, kind of smells like cheese.

"Of course, gorgeous," he tells her, and opens one of his pockets to show her he's wrapped up like thirty of the appetizers in a napkin. He tweaks her nose and smiles at her. "Things were hard back in my day. You hoarded what you could."

"Ew! Are you going to eat those out of your pocket?"

"I've eaten off worse," he says, and does the perv guy eyebrows again.

Tim has been cornered by three giggling girls and stands shooting Kol serious Save Me eyes over their heads. They are conversing with him in a mix of English and Arabic she mostly doesn't understand, other than the fact that they seem to think his accent is cute.

One of them asks him in English if he is married and is scolded by her friends, who burst out in that muffled oh-no-you-didn't! giggling that means they have probably already in their heads married off the ringleader to him, and are now picturing their pale, stuttery babies.

"I'd rescue him, but I'm a terrible person," Kol says.

She rolls her eyes.

"Excuse me, do you mind not slobbering on my boyfriend? Kay thanks," she snaps as she wades into the midst of them, in English because she doesn't yet know how to be that bitchy in Arabic.

She grabs Tim by his bowtie.

"Ouch!"

"Ok, well, I have to make it look real. I'm supposed to be pissed off. I just found my 'boyfriend' flirting with three women at the same time."

"I wasn't flirting; they attacked me."

She delivers him into the hands of Kol, who has helped himself to the groom's seat and is watching the crowd with cocked head, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned and the hem untucked.

"Seriously? This is a wedding. You can keep your big boy shirt in your pants for a few hours." She tucks it back in for him. "What did you do?"

"What do you mean?"

"You look plotty. You did something. What is it?"

He is completely terrible at the innocent look. "I don't know what you mean. How was your chat with the girls, Tim?"

"You're an asshole."

"Is that one of them coming back this way?" Kol asks, and as subtly as a 6' 3" man can hide behind a girl on whom he's got eight inches, he ducks behind her.

"What. Did. You. Do."

"Well, Mother, first I had some food -a lamb dish, it was very nice, thank you for asking- and then I danced for a while with anyone who was willing, which with a face like this is everyone, and then I had a nice chat with the groom's father, handsome man, you can see him over there-"

" _Kol_."

"-he told me something interesting about the bride's mother, which I happened to pass along to, oh, all of the wedding guests, and then-" He pauses.

She looks up just in time to see a man suddenly lurch forward and with his teeth take a chunk right from his friend's cheek. There is a spurt of blood, the shrill cry of the bride, whose dress gets the brunt of this sudden violent spray, and she turns back to Kol with her eyes wide. "What the _hell_? Why did that man just _cannibalize_ someone?"

Kol clicks his fingers. "Oh, right. That's what I forgot. I gave some of them bath salts."

"You gave them _bath salts_? What?"

"Don't you remember the news story from Florida some time back? The man who took a new drug they were calling bath salts and then ate his friend's face off?"

"How many people did you give them to?"

Kol rubs his chin thoughtfully. "Fifty? Or perhaps seventy. No more than that, though."

Enzo comes up behind them and puts his arms around both her and Tim. "Interesting." He nods his head at Kol. "Your doing, mate?"

Kol smiles.

And now behind her the music stops and the bride's screaming has cut off into shocked silence but the other guests have started to panic, shoving suddenly at one another or hurling themselves onto the stage where they can, for at least a moment, escape this bloodstained crazy in his nice tie and tails.

Rebekah locks the door to the reception hall and she and Kol share this conspiratorial smile, and she thinks, oh of freaking course, _this_ is their bonding moment, when for months they have rotated silently around one another with hardly a glance.

Enzo sits down beside Kol and starts to eat the appetizers in his pocket.

* * *

She likes to take the train back to Ramses Station in Cairo and stand for a moment among the thousands jostling or jolting along at heat-fatigued donkey speed, the poor things hauling their carts with droopy-headed resignation. There's this…charge you can feel singing somewhere in your spine and the hairs which prickle on your arms and at your neck, this big human _something_ , a humbleness, there's the endless tracks before you and a great open world and you could just…ride off into it.

She could cross on her never-weary tiptoes into Turkey's hallowed mosques, or sail into Caribbean yonder.

Klaus said: this boy, this town- they are never going to be enough.

But that wasn't it. If she'd had something real she could feel in her bones, and at night sleep in the warm drowsing of people who are sure of at least one eensy heart, beating not for all the sleek Elenas of the world-

But that wasn't her story, she thinks, and boards the train.

You can spend days just clattering up and down the country, rattling over the Nile and watching its valleys coast past the window with the air conditioning plunging you in Russian winter and the never-ending stream of helpful trays bearing mineral water and these sweet rolls she lives on for three straight days.

The refreshment car has singing waiters and this wood paneling she likes to touch with the tips of her fingers, and when the sun vanishes and the other passengers retreat to their bunks or drowse in their seats, she presses her nose to the window and sees a whole new Egypt wink from distant city spires and candle-lit village huts.

She's on her third such trip and halfway into her mineral water when someone plops into the seat next to her.

"Hi," Tim says, and then appears to forget how to talk.

"Did you follow me?" she asks.

"From Ramses Station, sorry, yeah." He thumbs the book in his hand, turning the pages like this is all he's absorbed in, and sliding his free hand down his leg.

"Why?"

"I was thinking I could talk to you away from himself." He licks his lips, and looks up at her from beneath his hat. "I wanted to say, you know, about the texts- while I was away…I'm not very good at that. I mean, I've never been big on the texting thing. You can ask Kol. He complains about it. Anyway." He licks his lips again and rifles the book and down his other leg goes his probably sopping hand. "You know I didn't reply to many of them- but they were nice. I appreciated that. You know, keeping me up to date on Kol and yourself so."

She pops her footrest out and rests the mineral water on her knee. "You stalked me to tell me that?"

"No. Sorry. I don't mean to act the creeper or anything. I can leave. I only wanted to say- we didn't make a good start of it. So I thought we could just…try that again." He puts the book between his knees. "Timothy Patrick O'Sullivan," he says, and holds out his hand for her to shake.

And she thinks oh, oh-

He's trying to be her friend.

She didn't recognize it, because it's never come chasing after her like this before. She's always had to wrestle it down herself, and pin it into submission.

"Caroline Marie Forbes." She takes the hand and shakes it once, one of those good, firm, business transaction shakes. "Can I call you Paddy?"

"No."

"Why'd you bring the book?"

"In case I chickened out and didn't talk to you. It's a twelve hour trip."

"Tell me five things that make you happy. Go."

He stares at her.

"Five things _go_ ," she repeats, because he's pretty but maybe a little slow which, totally not judging.

"What? Why?"

"Because this is how you get to know people. Five things that make you happy. Big things, small things, whatever. It can be any stupid thing that makes you smile."

"Um, books. Me home. Kol, when he isn't acting the maggot. Those little Russian dolls -what do you call them again- and…cigarettes."

"That's a terrible list."

"You said anything."

"Ok, but _seriously_? Matryoshka dolls? _Cigarettes_?"

"Matryoshka dolls- thanks a million. Slipped me brain."

"Why the dolls?" She shifts her feet on the rest.

"I don't know. There are just so many of them. And the painting's absolute shite when you get down to the last. Looks like the painting of Jesus the lady snuck into that Spanish church to try and 'fix', only he came out looking like a monkey. Did you see that?"

"Yes. Ok, my turn. The smell of rain, nature, that feeling you get when you first slip into a bath, putting on socks right out of the dryer, puppies," she rattles off. "Boom. That's how you do a list like that."

"Ah, that's all grand, but those dolls- you pop one of them open, and oh! There's another one. And then after that- there the bastard is again!" He makes this face that is so ridiculously taken aback she suddenly bursts out laughing.

"You're probably pretty funny when you're not, like, peeing yourself over this whole social interaction thing."

"You know, I would have gotten meself away from those lasses."

"Ok."

"I would have."

"Fine. Next time I'll leave you to it. I look forward to your wedding invitations. Ooh! Can I plan it?" She claps.

* * *

And because they still have seven hours to Aswan and neither of them needs much sleep she talks at him deep into the kind of still Egyptian night where nothing stirs outside the window, and he mostly listens, which he's good at, and is occasionally strong armed into actively participating by answering any tumblr question memes she can remember off the top of her head.

Kol reblogs them constantly, and gets annoying if she doesn't do them all.

He was born in 1891, county Kerry, Ireland, she learns. Hates children. (They smell. Also they run out of every orifice and are generally useless.) Loves Mexican food, which seems kind of random. Thinks Elton John is grand, which seems kind of stereotypical. No, gay men do not penis duel to decide who gets to be on top. (Seriously, she kind of thinks this would be revolutionary and just maaaaybe he should consider it if he has the good sense to realize how this would combine foreplay and that particular grunty competition men excel at and streamline everything for maximum efficiency.) Yes, he's done answering questions about how you do it man on man, which, rude. What if she was writing a slash fanfic?

"What do you do, when you look in your mirror and sometimes you don't know or like what's looking back?" she asks finally, with the seats empty around them and the car picking its slow and ponderous way over its next Nile crossing, the tracks echoing their journey off the black water.

He's silent for a long time, turning that over inside him.

"I don't want to be a human. Humans are lousy. What I want is to keep me scraps of humanity. Humanity is capable of terrible atrocities, and great kindnesses. I have, and I will, seen and committed both. What I want to always remember is no matter how old I am, no matter how much I've seen, no matter how I've realized, these people, they don't give a flying fecking air biscuit about themselves; why should I- I've still got love in me. There are still people I love. There's still a country I'd lay me body down with the dust for. I've still got that, inside me. I'm 123. I still miss me mother. I once killed a church full of people, because I was sad, and angry. And I still, 99 years later, get the butterflies when Kol smiles at me. I still love him like it's a nice thing, even from a perverse, murderous thing like meself. That's what you think about. When you have the bit of wood, or the ring in your hand, and you don't want it because you wonder what it feels like, you think, with those little leftover bits of yourself, wouldn't the world, me soul, me past and innocent self, who would have wept to see this- wouldn't they all be better off? And you remember where that comes from. You remember, you've seen a Hitler, a Stalin, you've seen yourself be worse than all of them, and still, you've got something left."

She smiles, and knuckles a little smiley face onto the window. "Ok. I'm going to remember that answer. Why do you read weird porn?"

" _What_?"

"Kol told me once you read this really ridiculous porn. Is it, like, human/dinosaur stuff? I've seen that on Amazon. Did you know you can make three freaking dollars _per_ Oona Cavetrope vs. the T-Rex's Penis?"

* * *

Bonus points: she discovers that, without much effort at all, Tim can be bullied into watching Nicholas Sparks sans the laughter of Kol, and without the plot hole reveals from Enzo.

He does sit there with this pretty over-the-top Please End My Immortal Suffering look on his face, and when he thinks she isn't looking, tries to adjust his hat so it's covering his eyes, but she is immediately wise to that and confiscates it hereafter for any and all marathons; she'd hate for him to miss their back to back Message In a Bottle/A Walk To Remember/The Notebook screenings.

Kol is just as freakily jealous as his big brother, but he's subtler about it, so three hours after she has kidnapped Tim from their own room and installed him in the chair she made up especially for him because he won't sit on the bed with her, he bursts into her room under the pretense of showing her more tumblr stuff, and freezes.

He takes one look at Tim's face, and has to sit down on the floor, he's laughing so hard.

"Why do you like him?" she asks Tim.

"I don't know," he replies, taking off one of his boots and throwing it at Kol's head.

* * *

She hears them fighting one afternoon as she rushes down the hallway, and pauses for a moment outside the door even though in moments like this you can't waste a precious teensy second, and suppresses the breath she doesn't need anyway so they can't hear her eavesdropping.

Tim is pretty worked up.

Kol sounds probably as apologetic as he can be.

"What did I tell you about playing with it?"

"I'll get you another one."

"Oh- you'll get me another one. Why didn't I think of that? You'll get me the same one I've carried since 1917, yeah? What the _fuck_ am I supposed to do with this? Would you fuckin' _look_ at it! I might well as slick it and stick it up me own arse- that's all it's good for now! You've totally _fucked_ it."

"You can do whatever you like with it. I don't judge," Kol says, not nearly as meekly as he probably should, considering how ticked Tim sounds.

She throws open the door. Tim is holding a pistol with a severely warped barrel, his pasty Irish face all red. "Ok, I know this is sort of a private moment, but this is an _emergency_. I can't find Enzo."

"Why? What's wrong? Has something happened to him?" Tim asks, setting aside the gun.

"I'm sure he's fine, but I need to go purse shopping. Like right now. There's a sale going on at that mall down the road."

Tim blinks. "But you don't pay for anything?"

Okaaay- definitely a little slow, if pretty. "It's the _principle_."

Kol pops up from the bed and kind of sidles up to Tim, all cute-like, with his best penitence on his face, and his hands behind his back; he can look almost angelic when he wants, which she is absolutely positive he learned from Klaus.

Tim rubs his forehead and gives this little sigh. "Fine. Take him."

"No, not _him_ ," she says, crossing her arms. "I'm here to pick up _you_."

"I'm wounded," Kol puts in, invading Tim's personal space.

Tim sits down on the bed beside his ruined pistol, and for a moment he looks so confused he could cry. "Wha- why? What do I know about your…" He waves his hand toward the bag she has slung across her shoulder. "…purse thingies? Why do you need another one?"

She shoots Kol that wow-how-embarrassing-but-anyway-I-guess-you're-not-dating-him-for-his-brains look and heaves her best done-with-you-but-humoring-you-anyway sigh, because she's a nice person. "Look, I'm not going to be friends with a gay couple and let a half off just _slide_ like I'll catch the next one." She snaps her fingers. "Up! Let's go."

"I'll compel her to go away if you stop being angry with me," Kol offers.

"Tim! Let's go!" she snaps. "Those purses are not going to just walk down here and politely arrange themselves for my inspection in order of type and color scheme!"

* * *

By contrast, Enzo loves shopping; he's happy to do anything, as long as you invite him, which makes her just kind of want to hug his head to her for a very long time.

So: one on/off again IRA assassin; an Enzo; two completely nutcase siblings who will literally murder you over an upset hairdo or a slow afternoon; and this is what in their own each and strange individual ways forms around her what she always suspected a real clique was supposed to look like.

There's no Elena: that's what she notices first.

She doesn't have to be pitted against any of them, to continuously justify her standing, to prove she is of some use and holds some worth; she can just _exist_ : there's value in that alone.

The boys take her on a camel safari into the western oases, steal the camels, eat the tour guide, plunge away into the sands at top camel speed, whooping and generally being guys while she sits this strange and swaying perspective and for a moment takes in how far ahead you can see, all the way up here.

Kol talks her into trying cocaine; what she does not remember of that night is later filled in by the boys, who take her out for dinner at a cafe with the best baklava she has ever tasted. One topless table dance; five tequila shots out of her belly button, in which Enzo and Kol and even bratty Rebekah partook but Tim did not; two shoplifting sprees in one of the bazaars; and one thorough bitchslapping of a testy 400-year-old vampire which ended in three broken knuckles (Tim), two broken tables (Enzo), and one broken testy 400-year-old vampire (Kol).

"Why did I bitchslap them?"

"He was hitting on you," Kol replies, brazenly eating the half of her baklava which she has not yet reached.

She slaps at his hand; he easily dodges her.

"Ah," Tim says, and scratches at the back of his neck. "He wasn't so much…you know…flirting as he was trying to…lure you into the back room. Where there's the…you know…private times and such."

"You mean that room in the club where all the vampires go to have their freaky blood orgies? You can just say 'doing it', Tim."

Kol leans back in his chair, still chewing, his feet in Tim's lap, hands behind his head. Somewhere he acquired a pair of sunglasses which he wears now, and you can tell he thinks he just looks lawd-ladies hot in them. "He was trying to take advantage of you in your vulnerable state of inebriation. So we murdered him."

"You got in a couple of impressive hits, gorgeous, don't worry. We only stepped in because of the age difference, or else we'd have let you handle it."

"With Jell-O," Kol says, wiggling his feet in Tim's lap, and smiling at him.

"Sure, be openly homosexual with me; that's subtle, in this country," Tim says when he brushes a thumb fondly against the dimple in Kol's chin and Kol ducks his head to kiss it, but he smiles back, and drapes his hands over the ankles of Kol's hiking boots.

She thinks for a moment about what he would look like here in this sunset with his Henley open at the throat and his curls strawberry with this old and weary sun which collapses now into the sea.

He'd miss the sunset and the blast of hookah smoke from the interior of the café and the ponderous wakes of the barges in the water which break and break again the slithering of the city across the waves because her face is always going to be the most fascinating thing in any country, continent, planet.

She hopes it burns when he pees. Or something. May whatever sand, damp, dust surrounds him now chafe his genitals, etc.

"What are we doing tonight?" Enzo asks, also helping himself to her baklava, because none of them have any boundaries, except Tim, who can be her favorite if he keeps his boyfriend's freaking paws distracted from her dessert.

"Drugs?" Kol suggests.

"I'm going to read," Tim says.

"I want to go see the catacombs," she offers.

Kol holds up a finger. "Drugs…in the catacombs. Tim can bring his book. No, wait- Tim can't bring his book. He's caught up in it; he'll ignore me."

"I won't," Tim promises.

"Ok, last time I did drugs, apparently I got half-naked and started a bar fight with a 400-year-old vampire."

"Yes, darling, welcome to a Tuesday night. Color me impressed when you manage all that, plus you get the Queen of England to engage in lewd acts on camera. During Parliament."

"Sure, lad, because you managed that," Tim says, forfeiting his chance at potential favorite when Kol reaches out for another piece of her baklava.

"I did."

"No you didn't."

"Yes, I did."

"No, you didn't."

Kol whips out his phone.

* * *

He's deep in poor old Trotty's revelations, the bells thundering round him their grim accusations when Kol suddenly asks him, "What were you doing here in the 60s?"

"Living," he replies, and gives the head a distracted tousle where it's laid out over his bare stomach, and settles back into his book.

Dickens was at his prime with this one; he never did understand why _Christmas Carol_ eclipsed its broad appeal, though that one's grand as well. But you crack the spine to the first quarter of this one, and from the infant paragraphs feel the wind rise round you with human mourning, Dickens carefully helping it along, not merely leading the pen through its motions but cocking an ear past his window to hear how the whole world laments when it's shut out of the empty churches and the warm houses and must go whistling along the Thames, lonesome in a way man with his opposable thumbs and his warm and moving flesh can never be.

"I assumed as much, darling." Kol pauses. "Are you crying?"

"No; of course not," he says, pressing a little harder on the _no_ than he meant to, and not wiping the eyes but giving the steady on, lad cough and the one two blink that shelves the evidence right quick. "Only he's got nothing but a couple of church bells to tell him, right, boyo, it's like this, you missed a step one dark New Year and took a noser onto the pavement, cracked yourself like a melon, what a sight that was, and now your daughter alone and poor and with all the hope gone from her like the nice pink Time, the musty old bitch, sucked right out of her cheeks so. And they're after being cunts about the whole thing."

Sure, go on and laugh, then, you absolute cock, only he wasn't crying anyway and go on and fuck yourself.

"So what were you doing here in the 60s? Aside from maintaining your pulse. I'm asking seriously."

He peeks over the top of his book to see Kol tilted toward him, chunk of bang in his eyes and all the sincerity you never could believe all over his trickster's sly mug. You can see he was once probably a sweetheart, though he kept it well stowed from the masses. The masses are always after exploiting your squishy spots. They can smell a chink from fifty yards- there's a man with no friends and heart enough for millions, on the double, lads!

"I don't know. Just stopped off. Decided to stay a while. You want a chronology?"

"Sure," he says, and smiles. "From 1915 to present."

"Oh, 1915, that was a poor year. You wouldn't be wanting to hear about that. Just awful. 1916 was all right, yeah. We had the Rising." He clicks his fingers. "I rode a horse naked. That's a story. Well, I wasn't naked, I was down to me cacks, but still, it's a zinger, that story."

Kol is smiling up at him, you can see he's not unappreciative, but he's not here to play, he's contemplative, introspective, any of the adjectives you know he wasn't long after enjoying before someone, he's not naming names, got a real bee up their arse over him not playing the jester to their bored king because the manky cunts can't wipe themselves after a shit let alone entertain their own pea wits.

Not that he's bitter on behalf of the beau, or anything.

Thump bang in the chest goes the smile; it's the space between the love poems he's feeling, where the most artful of the John Keatses can't quite grasp the tip of the fullness in them and from the aching throats yank it to be slapped, wriggling, onto the page. Sure it's too big for any Napoleonic genius.

He closes the book round his finger, and slides his free hand down for Kol's, whose fingers are cool; there's a thumb run over his knuckles, lingering over all the ancient breaks. "How many fights did you get into anyway, before you transitioned?"

"I grew up in a rough neighborhood. And I was skinny as a child, so it was either punch the fucker till he fell down, or the bastard would make off with your lunch again, and your ma'd want to know why your collar was all dirty when she'd just put her whole back into scrubbing last week's tumbles from the fecking thing. Well, she didn't say 'fecking'. Anyway, a couple of lads cornered me one morning while I was playing and stomped the living fuck out of me- I thought sure I was dead, the way they were having at it. I'd had me head fair bashed in and me ma carried on so you'd think I actually had when I stumbled home. I felt so bad for the scare I'd given her I carried a pipe next time I went out to play, and I nearly killed one of the lads when he tried it on again. I didn't mean to- I was just scared he wouldn't let me up this time. They pretty well fucked off after that. That was, oh, maybe a year before I started at the hotel where I met your brother. I must have been thirteen or so." He scratches his nose.

"And Nik always thought you were so harmless."

"Well, I was only defending meself. And I felt just terrible about it; I left him a cripple. I used to sneak his ma whatever I could spare from payday. Klaus wasn't far off the mark; I couldn't squish a fucking bug, after that."

The thumb bumps back, back over the knuckles, lifting the hairs on the back of his hand. "You must have been a lousy human, dragging that sort of conscience along behind you."

"I was a good human; it was the world around didn't cooperate."

"Did you ever regret it, after Nik turned you?" Kol focuses on the scarred knuckles, touching the space between each, and with the pads of his fingers drawing the ticklish little spook shudder you can feel at the base of your spine, where you sense the future footsteps tramping your long overgrown grave.

"Sure, when I first lifted me head and there was a man spouting in me hands and all I could think was oh Jaysus, what have I _done_? I wanted to die. Me ma must surely be watching and God was never going to forgive me. I'd had the tingly Satan thoughts about men and now here I was, a murderer to top it off. That's the only thing I have to thank your brother for. If he hadn't been there, I'd have still been kneeling over that man come morning and the sun would have finished me off."

The fingers stop. Kol shifts his head against his belly, so he's cheek down now, and the stubble scratchy on his skin. He can feel the breath slither up to his chest with warm little fingers that knot something in his gut. "I'm glad you're not dead. I would have-" He doesn't finish that.

Anyway, you can see how much he means it. There's more in the sentences a man can't finish than the ones he manages.

"Do you want to know the story behind the hat?" he blurts out, with that sudden burst of an unplanned confession.

"What is it?" Kol asks, and switches the fingers once more so they're threaded through one another.

"It's me da's. Me mother kept it after he died. They returned his things after they executed him. He didn't have much. The shirt was shot up, so she binned that. He had a few pence in his pocket, some boots not worth even that much, and the hat. So she told me; I don't remember. She kept the hat, took it all the way to America with her. A boy shouldn't have nothing of his father, says herself; she gave it to me soon as I was big enough to wear it. So I've worn it since 1902."

He won't admit it, but he likes that; you can tell the way he gets the crinkles round his eyes before the lips even lift in the smile. And thump bang in his heart again, the poor old ticker, got the permanent fright jolts since he took up with this fucker. "You are embarrassingly sentimental, Timothy. What did you keep of me?"

"I didn't have anything."

"Come on; not even a hair you snipped off and slept beside for your next fifty years?"

"No," he says, and he thought he was over it, till he finds he has to squeeze the words out, and feel each and every inch of them reeled up from his chest. "You were just gone. When I saw you again in New Orleans, I thought…for a moment I thought, oh, so he was having me on after all. Here's himself alive these hundred years and he didn't bother with a proper 'fuck off'."

The head lifts from his stomach; there's something wounded in the eyes, but that's all right, now, shush, it's only real when there's all kinds of bump and ache in it. "You thought I just left you?"

"Only for a moment. Then I slapped meself upside the head and decided, well, I'm going to sort the bastard out anyway. He won't make off that easy. And anyway, you can't fake what was in his eyes."

So there you have it.

He lived himself a whole human life and all the way back out the other end of it, into the far years where even the Japanese haven't touched the toes hold up seemingly forever amongst time's assault and battery, he was kicked, clocked, and on one occasion, shot, for his willful ignorance in matters of heart measuring, when you've got to size up how much space the other's afforded you, and oh, the immeasurable hurts of the young and naïve who always overestimate.

But he called that one.

The book gets plucked out of his hands.

He's kissed not like something that's broken young and sturdy bones with just a casual squeeze, like he's sick, like he's terminal, you've got to handle him gingerly, so, you've got to kid glove him, tissue paper it, but still you can't let him slip away till he _knows_.

The callused hands touch his chest, not to ignite it, just to stumble over the lines and dips of it.

Jaysus, it's nice, so, just with the warm body against him, and the foreheads pressing where the lips barely graze, just the little soft mouthings at his lower lip, hesitant so you'd think they're both just fresh off first base, and too overcome to make a grope for anything.

"You have such nice shoulders," Kol breathes into his mouth, and slides the hands up to feel them.

"Yeah? Want to put your legs over them?" He tries to carry it off slyly, all come hither beneath the eyelashes and my body is your temple somewhere in the hips area, but there's the fire in his cheeks tells him immediately he's cocked it up, and now Kol collapses in near tears on his shoulder.

"You almost had it, darling."

"Ah, fuck off."

"One day, you're going to dirty talk me and not make a twit of yourself. I have faith."

He flips them so he's straddling Kol.

Kol smiles up at him.

And then there's the blur and the brief upending of the world and he's got the whole thing half sorted out by the time Kol's topside once more, which is when the final pieces click in his mildly spinning brain and he is informed, round about the same time his wits single vision once more, that his prick, having noticed events, is beginning to take a vested interest.

He's not after a stick, stir, thanks, sir, though, Kol, he leans down and kisses him not quite so carefully as before, but he's hardly forceful about it either, he wants the lips to just know one another, he doesn't even press down with his hips, and for a full several seconds pulls back to rest the foreheads against one another, touching nothing else.

He gets his neck kissed; not with the hint of teeth behind it, but all exploratory, like Kol hasn't tasted the crook and kissed the adam's apple and felt before the exact angle at which the collar bones protrude, down onto his chest, where he hovers for a moment, almost shy, Jaysus, he could die at that, come here, you fuck, he could kiss you for a solid day-

He's got no shirt to haul Kol back by, so he hooks his hands under his armpits and yanks him up from where he's nosing at his sternum, and gives him a kiss that's probably too eager, and not very neat; he can feel Kol smile into it. He wanted to contain it; he was going to arch up a little and roll his hips into Kol's and gee boyo, Timothy, you blew the shorts right off me; that's what the kiss was going to do.

But so he gets his mouth against the lad's and what's inside of him is the big ballooning something that for an entire dumb minute left him mute when he walked into the bar and there he was, there he was, and you can't lie to yourself, no one really lies to themselves, they just forcefully forget afterwards, right, right, this was the moment gonged me to the fucking toes, and so what he does is just sort of grab at Kol's neck, and crush them together.

Kol doesn't mind, and he's kinder than you might think.

So he doesn't get a cuff to the shoulder or a snort of laughter, he isn't told, Timothy, Timmy, ease off, darling, is that any showing for a man who popped his cherry before Hitler graced his mother's infant eye-

Kol lowers himself so they are stomach to stomach; the strong arms wrap his shoulders and lift him from the bed, like they're not close enough.

He doesn't move back to kissing at the chest and mouthing the nipples for a long time.

His stomach tightens when the lips at last touch below his sternum, and begin, one open-mouthed kiss at a time, to inch toward the waistband of his trousers. Kol trails his nose through the line of hair there; he feels the aftermath of this in his spine, where it sparks something mad. His toes curl.

Got to kiss the hip bones thoroughly while he works at the buttons on his trousers, you can tell he's not even teasing, he just wants to feel it all, so by the time the fly's open and there's a hand down his boxers, he is already full attention. Don't blow like a chaste dumbass, he tells himself; he's only got the tip between his lips.

He makes a noise in the back of his throat; Kol squeezes the base of him, so he's momentarily reined in.

The hot mouth closes full round the head; Jesus, Mary and Joseph, he says or might have only thought, and grips the sheets.

He can barely stand the long slow slide down, where the tongue drags flat along the underside of him, one warm stripe all the way down to where Kol's still got his hand. The fingers loosen; the lips slip down another inch, so he's seated in the throat, which is just…grand, Jesus, peripheral vision going dark and all-

Kol swallows, so the tip of him is squeezed, and he sighs a little, and blindly finds the head with his fingers, so he can stroke the crown of it.

There's another flexing round his cock, he says, "Christ," and shudders; his toes curl so hard they crack. Then the head comes up, one smooth retreat all the way to the top with no little bobs of the neck to force his cock a little farther into Kol's throat, and he hears the lips pop off.

The skillful tongue rims him; he feels that in his belly, which coils tighter. "I'm going to come," he warns breathlessly, but doesn't pull the head up when the lips open round him again and there's another warm slide of the tongue and the sides of the cheeks which Kol has sucked in tight so he knows the snug wetness and the blackening ceiling above him and nothing else.

There's the throat round him once more and he says, "Christ, _fuck_ ," which is blasphemous, but anyway, he's probably not to worry about that when he's bollocks deep in a man.

And without warning, Kol suddenly starts to fuck him into his throat, little short, sharp jerks of the head that push him into the best of the tight wet heat and raise something embarrassing in his throat, he's got the full scale of prepubescent squeaks and yips in there, and he bites his fist, which is mildly painful and highly arousing, because ah, well, nothing for it, he's aberrant, and Jesus, _Jesus_ , he's right there, there's a red swimming round the corners of his vision and the ceiling pitching uncertainly, and then suddenly the head lunges up.

Kol grabs him by the throat, and jerks him up, and then the world, already spinning, pitches again, and somehow he's on his knees over Kol, who's flat on his back, his hair mussed, veins showing faintly under his eyes. "Come on me," he gasps, which is about as much encouragement as he needs; he gives his dick one jerk, sees the blinding white flare behind his eyes, feels the sharp crest, falls forward onto one hand with a shaky breath as he shoots all over Kol's stomach.

He goes momentarily blind; angels serenade him at either ear; he's about ¾ certain he can't feel his legs; even the Holy Father approves: yessir, this is what he intended all along for the penis.

"Jesus," he gasps, just for a moment, and then Kol's yanked him down into a messy kiss.

"Where's the lube?" Kol asks when they break apart, running a hand over his jaw. He's got the veins wrangled, but he looks glazed.

"In me bag," he says, kicking off the trousers which Kol only pulled low enough to work his cock free. He accidentally breaks the button on Kol's jeans, ripping into them the way he does. He pulls them down with the boxers. "Do you want it now?" he asks, kissing behind Kol's ear and pressing their hips flush so they're both naked and slick against one another, and there's a convulsive grab for his ass, an arch of the neck which says Kol's close, and he grabs the ear between his teeth now, giving it a suck as he thrusts with his hips. He's still sensitive; feeling the drag of that cock along the length of him catches his breath in his throat. He could go again, right now, Jesus, he could, and he sucks on the ear harder, feels Kol's fingers dig into his hips, starts to thrust against him, working his hand down between them so he can wrap it round them both-

"Stop. Stop," Kol gasps, and he does.

"What's wrong?" he asks, kissing the dimple in the chin, and for a moment resting his forehead against the heaving throat.

"Nothing. I want come in you."

There's a jolt to his stomach; he imagines the hot spurt inside him, breathes, "Ok, ok," against the sweaty neck, rolls off the bed to fumble round like a complete virgin through his rucksack.

He tosses the bottle of lube to Kol.

Kol rolls him onto his side; he feels a slick finger press inside him, and the hot white lightning of it hitting just the right spot. Fuck Jesus cunting Christ, says his brain; he slurs something unintelligible with his lips. Kol twists the finger, and kisses his neck, but so tenderly he almost feels ashamed he's after begging for the cock in another moment; Jesus, lad, make him feel like he's just there to flatten a client and then take his fiver and his leave.

He twists his head round so they can kiss; Kol pumps the finger in him slowly, pulling back from the spot sets off the sparklers round his eyes, and nudging in a little closer so he can feel the hard cock poke his back.

A hand goes over his ribs, the fingers splaying across him, and the hand slipping down his stomach, but not touching his prick; the arm creeps all the way round him, and Jesus, that's nice; he's hugged back against the damp chest. There's a second finger in him, but Kol pumps it leisurely, so he's a moment to calm the fuck down. He feels the nose burrow into the nape of his neck, and the arm pull him closer.

Christ, Christ, break his heart, why don't you. He won't tell you the dopey thoughts he's suffering at the moment; the sap would startle a Hello Kitty valentine: dial it the fuck back, ya' windy clop, would ya', she'd say.

He slides his fingers between Kol's, knots their hands against his stomach.

The fingers slip out; he twists back for another kiss when he feels the hips push forward and the tip of Kol's prick slip smoothly into him. Kol makes a noise against his mouth.

He kisses the tip of the nose glowing with sweat.

Kol bites his neck when he pushes all the way in; the fangs open two hot wounds and then there's the first pull and he lets out a sharp breath and arches back into Kol. He's not slamming him hard and fast, it's a smooth, slow roll into him, but he can feel Kol is close already, and disentangles their fingers so he can pick up the wrist, and close his lips round it.

When he breaks the skin the mouth freezes on his neck and the hips twitch, pull back a little, and he feels Kol come.

Kol doesn't move through it; he's had to pull back from his drink so he can breathe; the stubbled cheek scratches his neck and then the forehead presses against the top knot of his spine, like he can't decide where to brace himself, and the hand beneath his mouth fists; he licks the open wound; Kol says, " _Tim_ ," roughly, and then the hips slide back and angle up just a bit and he drops the wrist with a wrecked cry.

There are lips on his neck and a hand on his hip, and suddenly it's all frenzied, him pushing back and Kol thrusting into him and the blinding white pleasure that seizes him to the toes so he's just sort of helplessly moaning and clutching at the sheets and clutching at the hand and saying when he can, "Yeah, yeah" when Kol finds a sensitive spot on his neck or between the shoulder blades and then he hears the warning gasp and Kol comes again.

Oh fuck, fuck, he loves that, the slippery pumping of that cock inside him and the warm come suddenly, and the rough gasping in the nape of his neck, the hand convulsing on his hip bone, so you can hear it creak-

He thrusts up into Kol's hand when it slithers down off the hip and grabs his prick, and there's the single pass of the hand over him, the brush of the thumb over his damp slit, and then he's coming with a gasp that hurts his throat.

Kol jerks him through it, which oh God, Jesus, he can't describe it, with the cock still inside him pounding the sweet spot-

He's shuddering when he's done; the sweat's dripped into his eyes, so the wall he's facing has gone blurry. He can feel his legs shaking. "Jesus," he says, and flings an arm up over his eyes.

"Good show," Kol gasps into his neck.

* * *

She starts to get this creepy tingling in the back of her neck.

You've felt it, once or twice before in your life: the slow presentiment of _something_.

She feels it most of all when Enzo strolls the bazaars with her, and once, freakily, as she sits next to her open hotel room window, conjugating Greek verbs.

"It's insanity is all, darling. Only the best of us come down with it," Kol tells her lightly, but looks upset.

When she rides the trains now, she spends half her commute checking over her shoulder for that dope Tim, who should know by now he can just _talk_ to her and not creepy laser stare from afar, so that she can feel the faint flinching of her neck, certain of its vanished and unwelcome company.

But she thinks: oh, if it's not him.

She hears Kol's voice get uncharacteristically sharp once, when they are careening through the catacombs, dodging off to explore new tunnels and marvel over unseen engravings, and Tim disappears.

He grabs Tim's arm like a mother containing her wayward child, and says, "Don't break off from the group, darling, it's rude", and you're supposed to think it's a joke: she can tell that.

But he looks pained, he looks scared, and something unspoken passes between them and from then until their ascent Tim stays within arm's length, and collars her when she is suddenly distracted by a hall she has not yet walked.

* * *

She knew before she woke to jewelry she most definitely did not buy and most definitely did not place on her bedside table.

She is certain of that.

But still she sits clutching the necklace in her hand for so long, trying to determine how overwhelmed she is.

* * *

He wakes to find Tim asleep on his shoulder.

He's got the sheets wrangled down to his waist, and a book open on his stomach. His bangs are mussed, and the long eyelashes peacefully flat; he can feel the lips warm against his throat skin, and the muscled forearm which at some point has snuck onto his chest.

He swallows thickly.

Will you take Caroline back to Cairo, he asks when Tim stirs at last, knocking the book off his stomach with a startled curse.

She's been whingeing about seeing the City of the Dead again.

Tim blinks up at him.

One of the rough hands touches his cheek. "Sure, lad," he says softly.

And so he walks alone out to the Fortress of Qaitbey, just as the sun has begun to acquire that particularly sickly hue of an industrial dusk.

When the sun strikes the stones just right, and the shadow is thrown farthest, he thinks, and lo and behold, darlings, the curly head rears itself with precise timing from unknown gloom.

He didn't think it was going to feel like this, being sought instead of seeker.

Nik, he wants to croak out, and grab the Henley in his hands, so he has something on which to support himself.

* * *

 **A/N: Is Klaus riding a chariot pulled by his vampire minions into battle really a thing that happened? Yes, dear reader. This series is completely ridiculous.**

 **And so we close the 12th one-shot. As may be expected by this ending: KLAROLINE IS COMING. Also, more flashbacks, more violence, and, at long and final last...the end of the series. (Probably in roughly 85 installments, but still.) See you all (hopefully) come the 13th installment.**


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